Published Adventures

Posted on 1 June, 2013 by Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Commentary, DMing | Comments Off on Published Adventures

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

Posted on 23 May, 2013 by Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom vs. Structure in Class Design

Posted on 17 May, 2013 by 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.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged | Comments Off on On the Premium Spell Compendium

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?

Posted in Commentary | Tagged | 1 Comment