Freedom vs. Structure in Class Design

Posted on 17 May, 2013 by Law

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 Law

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 Law

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 Law

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 Law

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Obsidian Portal Reforged

Alternate Hit Point Systems (or, Various Ways to Make Crits Stop Being Fun)

Posted on 16 April, 2013 by Law

There’s a quiet assumption in 3rd Edition and its related systems that hit potions don’t actually keep track of damage. Getting cut by a sword is normally quite severe if not fatal, and gunshots and firealls aren’t any better. Rather, hit points represent fatigue, luck, training, or any number of things that allow you to survive in combat long after your armor has failed you.

I think Ultimate Combat put it best, or at least put it in the way that’s the most fun to read:

Hit points are an abstraction. When a fighter gains a level, his body does not suddenly become more resistant to damage. A sword’s strike does not suddenly do proportionately less damage. Rather, hit points suggest that the fighter has undergone more training, and while he may have improved his ability to deal with wounds to a small degree, the hit points gained at higher levels reflect less his capacity for physical punishment and more his skill at avoiding hits, his ability to dodge and twist and turn. Each loss of hit points, in this case, suggests that he is becoming progressively less nimble over the course of combat—in other words, that the decreasing hit points are a marker for his overall endurance and condition. It’s not quite as satisfying, however, to roll a critical hit and then tell a player that his opponent ducked out of the way, but that the sword’s slash made the enemy a little less lucky.

To bridge this gap, Wizards released a few options hit points variants as part of Unearthed Arcana (the fourth Core Rulebook). We could debate their merits as to how they represent the real world or change the balance of play, but that’s boring. Also, I’ve done too many posts lately on numbers. Instead I want to look at how fun they are, because that’s the point of the game and, ostensibly, the point of this blog.

There are four systems, three in 3.5’s Unearthed Arcana and one in Pathfinder’s Ultimate Combat. In the examples below, assume “character” means “PC, NPC, or monster”.

Injury

In Brief: When you take damage, make a Fortitude save, DC 15 + (damage / 5). If you fail, you take a -1 on subsequent injury saves. If you fail by 10 or more, you’re disabled, just like being at 0 hit points. Healing reduces the penalty to saves.

What it Means: Unless a characters has a high Fortitude save, every hit is a chance to be knocked nearly unconscious. Small damage values whittle away at your saves, increasing the chance of failure. Big damage values have a better chance to knock you out, but if you succeed you can shrug them off completely.

Who Loves It: Characters with high Fortitude saves or who make tons of attacks; players who love to gamble.

Who Hates It: Characters with low Fortitude saves; the unlucky.

Effect at the Table: Miserable. It puts almost every character at a risk of immediate, unpredictable failure and increases the chances that they’ll be knocked out before they can even take an action. It makes high-Fortitude characters completely immune to sufficiently small damage values (unless you rule that a natural 1 always fails by 10 or more, in which case every hit is a 5% chance to knock someone out). It gives every character a chance to completely ignore any attack by any other character, regardless of how much damage it deals; even a critical hit can be shrugged off, making it not much of a critical hit at all. Finally, it significantly increases the amount of rolling at the table, which slows the game and makes results less dependent on player choices and more dependent on happenstance.

Vitality and Wound Points

In Brief: Hit points are called “vitality points”, and are the same except you don’t add your Constitution modifier. You also have “wound points”, equal to your Con score. If you run out of vitality points or suffer a critical hit, deduct the damage from your wound points instead. At 0 wound points, make a Fortitude save to avoid going unconscious. Monsters have a similar system but are slightly different.

What it Means: Critical hits are a lot more significant, even critical hits that only do one point of damage. Fights are more lethal and thus faster, but because you recover one vitality point per level per hour, recovery between fights is also faster.

Who Loves It: Characters with a high chance to crit (by rule, a high crit multiplier is converted to a high crit range); monsters

Who Hates It: Characters with low Constitution scores; players

Effect at the Table: Cinema. Players have lower hit point totals while monsters, especially large monsters, actually have higher hit point totals, which puts the odds more against the players. Any hit is a chance to incapacitate an opponent, but it’s more based on the damage dealt rather than an extra saving throw after the fact. Critical hits also become a viable strategy against opponents with high damage reduction. Vitality points, and thus survival, are based more on your class (the choices you make) than your Con score (how you’re born), and it puts an emphasis on weapon-users rather than mages, giving non-magical classes a better chance to participate at high levels.

Reserve Points

In Brief: Hit points work just like normal. A character also gain an equal amount of reserve points. When a character takes damage, their reserve points are converted to hit points at the rate of one per minute.

What it Means: Players heal faster from lethal damage, to a point. No change occurs to battles.

Who Loves It: Players. All of them, actually.

Who Hates It: DMs used to the standard fights-per-day and Challenge Rating suggestions; timekeepers.

Effect at the Table: Freedom. It gives players a chance to last longer in a day without resorting to magical healing, which gives them the ability to do more in a day. It also reduces the stress on the healer and lets them spend their spells on something interesting rather than pumping cures into allies. But it doesn’t give players unlimited resources or let them bungle into fight after fight without downtime. A DM can use this to give the players more fights (since over the course of a day they essentially have double hit points) or harder fights (since the healer doesn’t have to save their big guns for healing during a long day). The biggest problem is that it requires the DM to decide exactly how many minutes have passed between fights, the sort of minutia that normally only matters to the wizard with his ten-minutes-per-level buffs.

Wounds and Vigor

In Brief: Determine vigor points and wound points just like the “Vitality and Wound Points” system, above, except wound points are doubled. Crits and negative energy damage can damage wound points directly. Losing half of your wound points makes you staggered, and healing can heal either vitality or wound points.

What it Means: A critical hit is almost guaranteed to stagger a character–an NPC on average is staggered by five wound points’ worth of damage, and even epic PCs are staggered after fifteen points.. Fights are more lethal and thus faster, and without magical healing a character may have to rest for many days before they are back in fighting shape even if their vitality points are full.

Who Loves It: Characters with a high chance to crit.

Who Hates It: Players and DMs who like long days or hard fights.

Effect at the Table: Downtime. Since healing can only apply to vitality points or wound points, it takes more healing to get a character back to full, and since a character with even a single missing wound point is unable to take actions without harming themselves, healing is more necessary. This leads to shorter days, both because the healer runs out of spells faster and because a player is more likely to be unable to continue once the healing is gone. It does have the same cinematic quality around crits as the previous Vitality system, but leverages it with the non-cinematic days of hospitalization and bed rest that follow.

I’m clearly a biggest fan of the Reserve Points system, and I think a big part of this is because it’s the same as the normal system. It’s quietly more powerful over a day but not much more powerful in a specific fight, and it doesn’t require a complete overhaul around the mindset of hit points. It does, however, have the same problem as the original hit point system, in that it’s still a vague abstraction of how hit points relate to character damage.

And you know, I’m okay with this. Just like how SimCity would be trash if growth happened in real-time (or if it required an Internet connection, zing!) and Mario games would be failures if the cartridge wiped itself every time you died, tabletop gaming isn’t at its best when it tries to perfectly mimic the real world. It’s at its best when everybody at the table is having fun, even when that requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

In fact, I tend to go the opposite route: every hit is an actual hit. It means that if a character is hit a few times with a sword, that character is actually hit a few times with a sword. D&D is kind of built like this already; it doesn’t make sense that a dragon vulnerable to fire takes extra damage throwing their back out from avoiding a scorching ray, so I say it hits. I feel it makes the characters seem more heroic, taking all this damage and fighting on, though that may be my shounen anime influences seeping in. Besides, 4th Edition is built like this somewhat explicitly. At least half of the powers don’t work if the intention is that a hit actually misses but makes the target feel sad.

I can understand a DM who looks at the hit point system and sees room for improvement. I’m just not sure that overhauling the system is the way to solve it (and I’m absolutely certain that the Injury system is the wrong way to do anything).

Posted in DMing, House Rules | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

On the Premium Spell Compendium

Posted on 11 April, 2013 by Law

I know it’s not really in keeping with the theme of the blog, but I have to point out how ridiculous that Wizards is putting previews of the Spell Compendium reprint on its website. When I visit the Wizards website, I tend to expect content (content aimed at getting me to purchase a product, but content nonetheless), not “previews” of a book that came out in 2005. Instead, the previews contain only the fluff description of a few spells.

Dear Wizards: if you’re trying to resell a book that you already published seven years ago and the only selling points are the errata and an “attractive new cover”, perhaps the previews should contain the errata or the cover. Though, now that I’m looking at the cover, perhaps hiding it is best.

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that no excerpts for new material have been posted since October. I guess it’s good that they’re working on 5th Edition and that they’re making this information available to a new generation of role-players, but it weirds me out that the crunchiest articles these days are of the “Didn’t we used to be great?” variety.

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On the Speed of Experience

Posted on 7 April, 2013 by Law

The more I read about 5th Edition, the less I like it. Luckily, the players who comment on official Wizards articles feel the opposite way, so at least we balance out.

This time the issue is with the advancement discussed in the latest Legends & Lore article. The post is largely about tiers of play and is largely boring (unless you’re new to D&D, in which case it’s pretty well-written and sensible), but the end of each section describes the expected level advancement:

[In the Apprentice Tier], the idea is to have one play session that covers character creation and reaches 2nd level, and then have a second session that takes you to 3rd level.

Adventurer tier runs from 3rd level to 15th level. You can expect to level every other session in this tier.

Legacy tier runs from 16th to 20th level, with characters gaining a level every three sessions or so.

Early in my career, I had characters level about once every three or four sessions. Eventually I slowed it down for a few reasons. One, it breaks verisimilitude to think that characters are going from mundane folk to serious heroes in only about a month of adventuring. Two, I don’t like that, by rule, later levels are just as fast as earlier levels. Three, when the game’s power level scales that rapidly it’s harder to get a feel for growth. Four, it makes players more likely to reach for future gains rather than thinking about the characters they have now. And so forth.

My campaigns now are a lot slower. Except for the Tower Campaign, where the whole point was taking a kick-in-the-door, fast-experience, no-consequences world and slowly introducing deeper story and long-running plots, characters in my campaigns level once every seven to ten sessions. There are outliers for story reasons, but in general I’ve thrown the standard experience progression out the window.

So when I read that 5th Edition is based on a faster progression than even the system I rejected for being too fast, I find that terrifying. I’m envisioning the kinds of players who are thrilled by leveling that rapid, and I’m not anticipating an exciting play experience with them. Instead, I’m looking at a game where the focus is on getting cool new abilities instead of playing a character, something that seems expressly at odds with the stated goals of 5th Edition.

From what I understand of 5th, there aren’t a lot of neat choices you can make at later levels either. You choose your class, your feat tree (like a fighter can focus in different weapons, a wizard can use different schools, etc.), your background, what have you, and then you start playing. There are no options in the build beyond character creation because everything is carved in stone. Perhaps this has changed, but if it’s still correct then I don’t even understand why somebody would want to level along a liner, non-branching path.

Interestingly, at the same time Wizards announced “leveling will be super-fast”, they also announced the apprentice tier, where they’ve taken 1st-level characters and actually split them up into three levels so that players can play characters in their pre-adventuring career. Thus an L3 character in 5th is the equivalent of an L1 character in any other edition. The comments section loved it. So what I’m seeing is “we love taking our time to slow down and develop our characters, as long as we get to dump that trash fast and get to watching numbers go up.”

The article does make a point of saying that it’s trivial to change the XP progression, and that’s true. If you double the XP it takes to level, character will level half as quickly. Simple. But that’s a house rule made by the DM, which means it’s not the way the designers intended the game to be played. Intention pervades the rules, and if Wizards really wants fast leveling, then rulebooks, published modules, future articles, everything will be based on this intention, leaving DMs on their own to fix it.

4th Edition caught a lot of flak for being too much like a video game and not enough like a pen-and-paper system. How can nobody see that 5th Edition is the same thing?

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Underpowered: Samurai (3.5E)

Posted on 1 April, 2013 by Law

The samurai has been ranked by very smart people as perhaps the least-powerful PC class in D&D 3.5. Apparently it’s on par with the expert, the adept, and other NPC classes. I think it’s common knowledge that non-spellcasting classes are generally less powerful than spellcasting classes, but is the samurai really that bad?

Well, let’s compare it to the fighter. Both have full BAB progression. Both have good Fortitude saves. Both have d10 Hit Dice. Both have two skill points per level, and both have Craft, Intimidate, and Ride as class skills; the fighter also has Handle Animal and the mobility skills (Climb, Jump, and Swim), while the samurai has Concentration, Diplomacy, Knowledge (history), Knowledge (nobility and royalty), and Sense Motive. It’s clear that at its base the samurai is a fighter with a little less of a focus on adventuring and a little more on interaction.

The skills tell another story though. The fighter’s skills are Strength-based (and Handle Animal, which makes sense with Ride), and most fighters are good at Strength. The samurai’s skills are more varied, with one Charisma-based, one Wis based, two Int-based, and Concentration (which the class has no way to use, so I expect it’s only there to help samurai qualify for the kensai prestige class later in the book). This lack of focus makes it harder to really excel at skills, and a samurai will probably have to choose between interaction and knowledge.

But nobody plays fighters for the skill points, do they? The real focus is on the eleven bonus feats. Samurai also happen to have eleven abilities they gain over time. So how do they stack up?

  • Daisho proficiency: A bonus feat that the player doesn’t get to choose. All samurai get Exotic Weapon Proficiency (katana) at L1. In general, getting a bonus feat is not as good as choosing a bonus feat, since it limits character options and power. So this is a bit worse than a fighter.
  • Two swords as one: A bonus feat that the player doesn’t get to choose and it only works in certain situations, but the character gets to ignore prerequisites. That’s usually pretty balanced (and the ranger is based on it), but the restriction here is greater. So the samurai just barely loses out here.
  • Kiai smite: It’s like a paladin’s smite, which is better than a feat. But the samurai’s smite damage is drastically lower at almost every level (Cha mod vs. class level) and the samurai gets it less frequently than a paladin. We’ll call it a wash.
  • Iaijutsu master: Another bonus feat that the player doesn’t get to choose, and it comes with an extra restriction. Worse than a feat.
  • Staredown: +4 to Intimidate, better than a feat (Skill Focus) but the player doesn’t get to choose it. The text also says that the samurai “can demoralize an opponent”, which characters can already do. It’s like a class power that says “you can jump”. We’ll call this even again, but I’m not fully convinced.
  • Improved Initiative: A bonus feat that the player doesn’t get to choose.
  • Mass staredown: This is the first time the samurai gets something unique. This is level 10. So it’s a win, but it shouldn’t have taken this long to let one.
  • Improved two swords as one: It’s like two swords as one, above. But while a ranger gets the equivalent of this ability at L6, the samurai has to wait until L11. So this is a loss.
  • Improved staredown: The ability to reduce demoralization from a standard action to a move action, not unlike what Improved Feint does for feinting. So it’s like getting a feat, but you don’t get to choose it, but it’s also not available as a normal feat. I feel like I’m being too down on the samurai, so I’ll do it a kindness and call this “break-even.”
  • Greater two swords as one: Same as improved two swords as one, right down to getting it five levels after the ranger. Similar loss.
  • Frightful presence: The samurai’s capstone ability, this can grant a long-standing penalty (often as long as the entire fight) to every opponent in the battle. But it’s a penalty that doesn’t stack with the staredown, which is what the samurai has been doing since L6, so it’s not too ridiculous. Even though high-level NPCs and monsters are completely immune to it, we’ll say this is better.

By my reckoning, the samurai gets two abilities better than a fighter’s bonus feats, three that are about as good, and six that are worse. The ones that are better aren’t much better, so it’s looking pretty dim.

But it actually gets worse than that. All of the samurai’s staredown abilities are based on the Intimidate skill, so taking max ranks in it is as good as necessary. Without it, the samurai loses its signature ability, and with it, the samurai gets one fewer of its already-sparse skill points. A non-human samurai with Int 8 essentially gets no skill points at all. And since the paladin’s staredown, kiai smite, and frightful presence are all based on Charisma, a samurai is running low on places to put its low stat rolls.

And a note about the power of staredown. Say you’re a samurai. To make an opponent shaken for one round, your Intimidate check has to beat the opponent’s modified level check (d20 + Hit Dice + Wis mod). Let’s ignore for a second that I don’t like comparing rolls (especially d20 rolls) as a resolution mechanic. If you always fight equivalent-level NPCs, you come out slightly ahead, because your ranks in Intimidate should be three higher than the opponent’s level and your Cha should be about the same as their Wis. But monsters usually have more Hit Dice than a player and this difference increases at higher CRs, so staredown’s usability drops against them as you level. And mindless creatures are immune to it wholesale, as are any creatures immune to mind-affecting abilities or fear.

Which gives us a class that looks like a fighter, but it needs to split its ability scores more, its abilities aren’t as good as bonus feats, and its only unique ability (staredown) rarely works and isn’t synergistic with its other key ability (two-weapon fighting). Yeah, I’d call that worse than a fighter.

I actually like the samurai from Oriental Adventures better. It’s like a fighter, but with good Will saves, four skill points per level, and the ability to enhance their swords. The tradeoff (besides, I guess, shield and heavy armor proficiency) is that their bonus feats must come from a series of lists based on their clan; a crab samurai can get the Power Attack tree as bonus feats but not the Combat Expertise tree, for example. I think that if you like the samurai, that’s not a bad place to go. But it loses a lot in the fun factor. It’s basically the fighter but a little better, and all the flavor is in the feat selection (you know, like a fighter). It also doesn’t have the 3.5 samurai’s key mechanic, the staredown. So I think we can do something in between to make the samurai both powerful and interesting.

First let’s deal with the bonus feats. Instead of giving one hard-coded progression, let’s give the player a choice of progressions. They’re still hard-coded, yes, but we don’t want to take too much away from the fighter by duplicating its abilities. The clans from Oriental Adventures have some good ideas on theming, so let’s steal them wholesale. This replaces the abilities gained at the listed levels:

Clan: Each samurai is part of a clan, an association of samurai with similar training and principles. As the samurai’s fighting style improves, he gains access to new abilities.
At the levels listed in the table below, a samurai gains a bonus feat determined by his clan. If he already has the listed feat, he instead gains any other feat for which he meets the prerequisites.
Clan Crab Crane Dragon Lion Phoenix Scorpion Unicorn
1st Weapon Focus (greatclub)* Weapon Focus (longspear) Exotic Weapon Proficiency (katana) Shield Proficiency Lightning Reflexes Combat Expertise Mounted Combat
2nd Power Attack Dodge Two-Weapon Fighting Weapon Focus (longsword) Alertness Dodge Point Blank Shot
5th Cleave Mobility Quick Draw Iron Will Iron Will Improved Disarm Mounted Archery
8th Improved Sunder Improved Initiative Improved Initiative Leadership Combat Reflexes Prone Attack Zen Archery
11th Improved Toughness Spring Attack Improved Two-Weapon Fighting Improved Shield Bash Great Fortitude Improved Trip Trample
16th Great Cleave Quick Draw Greater Two-Weapon Fighting Hold the Line Blind-Fight Whirlwind Attack Improved Mounted Archery

* – Feel free to use any big scary weapon here; the greatclub is a Core placeholder. I suggest a greataxe that does bludgeoning damage (a greathammer), or a tetsubo if you want to change it to Exotic Weapon Proficiency instead.

All of these feats are either in Core or Complete Warrior. That’s intentional.

Note that the dragon clan duplicates the samurai’s old feat list. The goal isn’t to invalidate the old samurai, just give it more choices and power. If somebody really wants to play the katana-and-wakizashi samurai, they should retain that option. But also note that the feats no longer requires the katana-and-wakizashi combo. There’s no reason a dragon samurai couldn’t dual-wield hammers or picks or axes or even katanas.

Now, the staredown. The big issues I have with this are that it takes forever to get going, it relies on opposed rolls, it grants a penalty many creatures ignore, and the results only last one round. There’s nothing I can do about the opposed rolls because that’s how demoralizing works. But the rest:

Staredown (Ex): At 6th level, a samurai becomes able to strike fear into his foes by his mere presence. He gains a +4 bonus on Intimidate checks. An opponent demoralized by the samurai is shaken for one round plus one round for every five points by which the samurai’s Intimidate check beat his opponent’s modified level check.
Mass Staredown (Ex): At 10th level, the samurai has sufficient presence that he can cow multiple foes. Using an Intimidate check, the samurai can demoralize all opponents within 30 feet as a standard action. Also, the samurai can now demoralize creatures normally immune to mind-affecting effects, though he takes a −10 on his Intimidate check against such creatures.
Improved Staredown (Ex): At 14th level, even a glance from the hard eyes of a samurai is enough to give his foes pause. The samurai can demoralize opponents within 30 feet as a move action, not a standard action. He can demoralize enemies within 60 feet as a standard action. Also, the penalty for demoralizing creatures immune to mind-affecting effects is reduced to −5.

So now staredown is more meaningful at L6 than it is for other characters, something the original samurai lacked, and the penalty’s duration is potentially increased. At L10 creatures are no longer immune to the samurai’s staredown, and at L14 the usability increases further. The samurai’s unique mechanic is actually worth using, and he can try it once or twice in a fight rather than spending the whole combat maintaining his enemies’ penalties.

I also recommend increasing the skill points to 4 per level and adding Climb, Jump, Perform, and Swim to the samurai’s class list. This lets them be as mobile as the fighter and plays to the cultured flavor of samurai while giving him the skill points to spend on it. No longer is an Int 8 samurai locked out of skills altogether (I suppose an Int 4 samurai still is, but that’s the territory of Int 4 so I don’t think I’m too worried about that). I’d love to do something about kiai smite, but it can stay as it is. Don’t want to change everything.

With that, we have a class with more options, more flavor, and more power than the original samurai. I know this isn’t enough to bring it up to the level of a spellcasting class, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal is to make the samurai into a class that people want to play rather than a class that people only view to make fun of the art, and I think that’s what we did.

I’d list the whole class here or provide a link to an HTML version, but I’d rather not duplicate all that Wizards material. You print out this blog post and stick it in your (legitimate, hardcover) copy of Complete Warrior if you’re that worried about having it all in one place.

Posted in Gaming Systems, Underpowered | Tagged | 7 Comments

Players Making Failure Interesting

Posted on 26 March, 2013 by Law

So we had a TPK on Saturday.

The party came across the guardian to a gate we had to open. In the first round, the fighter won initiative, charged, and did 75 points of damage in one hit, dropping the enemy to about 20% health. The DM, seeing the writing on the wall, had an ally show up. But then the PCs went on a string of back luck: the fighter started missing, the rogue didn’t have the speed to flank with him, the wizard’s touch attacks were foiled by deflection bonuses, and the healer wasn’t at the session. In the end, the NPC fairy had to open the gate while the surviving guardian was futilely chasing the PC fairy around the room (it makes no more sense in context).

It wasn’t really anybody’s fault, just one of those things that happened. It’s hard to predict a string of bad rolls, it’s hard to work around the unexepected limitations of the characters, it’s hard to balance an encounter on the fly, and it’s hard to do anything when players aren’t available.

The thing it, the failure made the story better. The campaign has two sets of PCs: the A-Team (A for Awesome) and the B-Team (B for Bad). The A-Team is fledgling gods, the B-Team is comic relief. Ending an encounter in one hit is for awesome players, not comedy relief. It was much more appropriate and cinematic for the B-Team to muster their forces, approach a challenge, fail miserably, and get saved by somebody more competent.

There’s a lot of talk around the DM’s responsibility to make failure interesting, and it’s not inaccurate. A failure of “You jump the cliff, but drop your backpack” is more interesting than “You fail to jump the cliff and die”. Just Google the phrase “making failure interesting” for a fairly complete view of it. I think the whole idea is incomplete, short-sighted, and, unless handled by a DM far smarter than the concept expects, designed for a bad play experience. But that’s not what this post is about.

Instead, I’d like to put some of the onus on the players for making failure interesting, something that I couldn’t find any reference to in my research. It’s not solely the DM’s job to keep things fun, it’s everyone’s (Law #0 + Law #4). The DM can try to keep things interesting, but if the players are having none of it than the game won’t work at all.

Take our TPK. (Please! Ha, I kill me.) The DM was none too thrilled by it, but the players treated the whole thing like an excellent story for the PCs. It reinforces our role as the underdogs of the setting and keeps us in character. If we can slaughter our enemies, then we’re heroes, not the B-Team. If we signed up to be the campaign’s comic relief, then it’s our job to maintain that as much as it’s the DM’s.

If a DM isn’t making failure interesting, the players can. If a player fails to pick a lock and the DM decides that they don’t get through the door, I’ve seen too many DMs explicitly state that this is bad DMing. By that logic, the player who tries again, or the player who shrugs and forgets about it, is a bad player. A good player would see the failure, acknowledge it as learning, and try something else. A good player would break down the door, or use acid on the lock, or break out their magical lockpicks, or look for another way in.

Failure isn’t uninteresting in and of itself. Failure is uninteresting when it doesn’t advance the game state. If a player then uses the failure as a chance to advance the game state, then the failure is interesting. DMs are there to explain how the world reacts to the players. The players get to decide how they react to the world, and even “nothing happens” is an opportunity to react.

Posted in DMing | 1 Comment