Here’s the deal. My good friend Trey Call, guitarist and one-half of the brilliance in the band Dirty Proper, is looking for help to fund the band’s first venture across the pond to play in the UK. Funds raised will help offset the costs of transportation, accommodations, equipment, and the hiring of other musicians while over there. They’re a great band, supremely talented, and also very much self-made. This is a great chance to help them spread their music to new markets.

What does this have to do with D&D? Well, I’d like the band to succeed, so I’m offering a yummy carrot to my friends on the Internet. If you pitch in 20 bucks (or more) to Dirty Proper’s campaign on Indiegogo, I will run an awesome 2-hour game of D&D for you and other contributors in a hangout on Google+. Send me a message through this website and I’ll match the email address with the one you used to make the contribution and we’re all set. We’ll just need to coordinate schedules to choose a time to play and also choose the edition. For every 5 or 6 contributors, I’ll run a game. The goal will be to do these before the summer’s end, with most games played in June. I can probably do about four or five of these and group sizes will depend on the level of interest.

So if you want to play some hard-core, ultra-violent, fantasy roleplaying, just click the link, donate, and shoot me an email through this site.

Thanks!

The evening started when I followed through on an invitation to talk to some local teens about writing, game design, and so on. I arrived at the library ahead of schedule. Sat in an office until it was time to start. And then was introduced to the audience. It was an interesting time, but I was a bit disheartened that the kids didn’t know anything about RPGs, and the lion’s share of the questions came from three adults, one of whom is a good friend from all the way back to the days of High School. After the talk, I wandered out of the library, down the steps to the garage below, and drove on over to 2 Public Square.

My fellow beer-slayers were there and we swapped the usual lies, traded offensive stories, raged about the troubles with nouns (people, places, things), and settled into the usual evening of bar banter. It was a bit into the night when I started talking about system complexity as a barrier to entry (I’m super-fun to drink with; in my defense, I was asked. I’m just as happy to talk movies, TV, sports, the gubment, whatever), something that’s been defecating in my brain pain for these last few months. What brought this up was how none of the kids had ever played a Pen & Paper RPG before and every time I used the word, I could see their minds latching onto Mass Effect or some other video game. Anyway, I spent a few minutes talking about how the various editions of The Game handled grabbing, grappling, and wrestling, and how the various efforts ranged from absurdly complex to overly simple, all to illustrate my point that simulation can and does get in the way of having a good time. This was not the interesting part of the conversation.

The interesting part came when my buddy Dustin asked why such games needed to be so complex. Rather than give a short answer—you have to understand that for every 1d2 beers I drink, my stories get 1d6 minutes longer—I said let’s make up a game. Right now. Well, right then. I wanted to show just how simple an RPG could be (both to him and myself). Here’s what I came up with.

You have three attributes, Killing Stuff and Doing Stuff and Hits.

Killing Stuff describes how well you murder things. My inclination is to say a character should murder things about half the time he or she tries. Others disagree and want to murder things all the time. So I will compromise and say 2 out of 3 times.

Doing Stuff describes how well you do things associated with your character concept. If you’re a warrior, the stuff you do probably involves breaking things and people. If you’re a wizard, the stuff you do is Book Learning, being pompous, and having all the answers. In this case, when a character has to roll the dice, I want him or her to succeed 1 out of 2 times.

Finally, Hits describes how many times you can be hit before you die. I decided on 4 times. It felt fair to me. Sorry if you disagree.

This is a simple game and so it only uses one 6-sided die. Since I know my accuracy rates are 66% to kill stuff and 50% to do stuff, I can easily model this on the die roll. You Kill Stuff when you roll a 3 or better and Do Stuff when you roll a 4 or better. Done.

What about the bad guys?

All bad guys have Kill Stuff, Do Stuff, and Hits too. We want these guys to be worse, so they Kill Stuff on a 4 or better and Do Stuff on a 5 or better. We also want bad guys to die quick, so a standard Bad Guy has 1 hit, tough Bad Guy has 2 hits, and a Bad Guy you fight all by himself has 4 or 5 hits.

In a fight, each group rolls a d6. Side with the highest result goes first. We don’t care about moving around. We only care about Killing Stuff in a fight. Each combatant uses Kill Stuff (strike with a sword, shoot an arrow from a bow, blast a monster with magic) by rolling a d6. If the character gets a result equal to the score or higher, he deals 1 hit to the target.

And that’s it.

I could of course make this more complicated. Some monsters might be harder or easier to hit, which would increase or decrease the chance of Killing Stuff. I could also layer in improved Killing Stuff options. These options would let characters spike their damage at different frequency rates.

1/Fight: A character can use the 1/Fight benefit once in a fight before rolling to Kill Stuff. On a success, the character deals 1 extra hit.

1/Game: A character can use the 1/Game benefit once in a fight before rolling to Kill Stuff. On a success, the character deals 2 extra hits. On a failure, the character deals 1 hit.

If I wanted to layer in levels, I could increase the number of 1/Fight and 1/Game benefits and also increase the number of extra hits as the characters gain experience.

If I wanted to layer in multi-target Killing Stuff options, I could just tax a 1/Fight, 1/Game benefit 1 Hit to affect one extra target.

And, you know, it doesn’t really matter what these pieces are, right? These elements can be whatever the player wants. A hit is a hit is a hit. If a player decides he or she attacks monsters using a sentient and giant pink teddy bear, that’s fine. If another player wants to suck souls with Stormbringer, that’s fine too. The system doesn’t change no matter how you dress it up. The stories players and GMs tell can. Space Opera, Western, Fantasy, whatever flavor of escape you want, this can do it.

I wonder if this isn’t all you really need. Sure it’s crude, ultra simple and unpolished. Sure, the quality of game play would vary based on the GM and players’ imagination. And at the core, there’s no improvement, no growth, no development beyond what you start with. But really, when you get right down to it, and I’m sure I’m wrong (16 years of marriage has made me comfortable with being wrong [I kid!]), isn’t your favorite game basically this anyway?

I suppose I was seeking approval from my Dad. He looms large in the memory. My Mom, of course, was an unwilling participant and I suspect she had already made up her mind that Satan spilled the game from his loins to ensnare my soul. (It’s ridiculous really. My mother, who still bristles when she thinks about what I do for a living, pressured me into selling my D&D books in junior high. This, of course, meant I would spend my weekends playing Marvel Superheroes, Top Secret, GURPS, Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying, Star Trek, and Twilight 2,000, and others. If Satan had wanted my soul, there are simpler ways he could have done it. One succubus to shepherd me through puberty certainly would have been enough. No succubus ever appeared, alas.) My Dad at least pretended to be interested, though he had the customary Schwalbian sarcasm and detachment, but I was hopeful since he had read great swathes of classic sword & sorcery fiction. He read a lot of Conan when I was a kid, and he was a big fan of the Judge Dredd comics.

I think my Mom played a dwarf. My Dad chose the fighter. I had hoped he would have an awesome name—Thundarr, Krull, or something else. He went with Fritz, inadvertently crushing my hopes (I thought he wasn’t taking it seriously). See, I wasn’t yet old enough to not want to spend time with my parents, and I really wanted their approval about this game.

I really can’t tell you what happened in the game. They had a combat or two, and then it was over. My Dad said it was interesting but not for him; my Mom informed me she didn’t like the Satanic overtones.  And that was that.

Later, I think my Dad and I were driving to the old Great Escape on West End in Nashville (it is no longer there alas) to pick up comic books, I asked my Dad what went wrong. He told me it was too complicated. Too many things going on for what should be a game about imagination and creativity. He said he thought the game would be much improved if the character could fit on index card, just a couple of numbers and that’s that. Anything else is just too much.

I bristled at his assessment and I felt a bit foolish for liking the game as much as I did. I did, however, continue to play and I remember thinking back as I moved into more complex games that he was wrong. Dead wrong. A game should be as complex as it needs to be. The only way to achieve immersion (though this concept was beyond me at the time) was through perfect, or near-perfect, simulation of the world. I’ll be honest, I clung to this belief throughout my gaming years and even into my career as a game designer.

At least until recently. When my personal life became complicated two years ago and remained interesting in the Chinese sense, I put gaming on hold. I dissolved my regular Sunday game. I dropped out of the weeknights. And I concerned myself mostly with sucking down beers in Murfreesboro’s best bar. I emerged from my self-imposed hiatus to run play tests and I continued working, but I wasn’t doing any real gaming.

In the thick of this period, my buddy Dustin revealed had was curious about D&D. He knew, basically, what it was. He’s a great reader of fantasy & science fiction. He enjoyed movies from the same genre and he was the one who talked me into picking up Diablo 3, which was fun the first couple of times I ran through it. I suggested he give D&D a try. He told him about D&D Encounters and pointed him to the game store where it happened. He bought the Rules Compendium and even signed up for DDI account. He pestered me about his character and was super excited to play. I did not go with him any of the times he went. A few weeks later, the emails about the game and character stopped. When I next ran into him at the bar, I was sad to hear he didn’t enjoy himself. The game was too complex and he felt like he spent the whole night waiting to take his turns.

Dustin is exactly the kind of person who should love D&D. He’s the target audience. Mid-twenties, single, good job, and smart, with an interest in geek stuff. And we failed to grab him.

Now, I’m not railing against 4th Edition or D&D. Since I eased back into actual gaming, I play and run D&D and have a good time. I doubt that will ever change. I am, however, still attracted to the idea of something easier, something faster, and where the rules don’t behave like an obnoxious jackass in a hotel bar. I find myself resenting the intrusion of rules into the story. I don’t want the game’s narrative to bend around the task resolution system or how a particular subsystem works. I want combat to be fast and furious, with real risk of character death from round to round. I want rapid character creation and character sheets unburdened from the unimportant references to mechanical objects that say nothing about the world in which the game takes place and serve only to provide hyper-situational benefits in the most ludicrous circumstances. Above all, I want the system to fade into background, to be nearly invisible in actual game play. Heresy, I know, but after almost 30 years, I think I’ve finally figured out what my Dad was talking about. And I think, for me at least, he was right.

As I mentioned a few weeks (months now?) back, I’ve been running a modified version of 1st Edition AD&D every other Sunday night. Having spent a year or so playtesting the Next rules, I wanted a more stable set of rules for running an ongoing story. The games have been great, players seem to have fun, and the focus on story and character development is better than anything I’ve experienced since before 3rd Edition. There’s a weird wrinkle and one I thought worth talking about. The characters die a lot.

Surprise! Not really. Anyone who has played 1st Edition or even 2nd Edition knows 1st-level characters have short lifespans. Random starting hit points, bonus hit points from high Constitution sequestered in scores of 15 or higher, and death at 0 combine to paint a grim picture for would-be heroes. When a hastily flung dart can send a wizard screaming into the grave, you get few chances to make mistakes and come out with all your fingers and toes intact. I knew this when we started and so I wisely took steps to insulate the characters against death. I didn’t go overboard. Just a few steps, borrowed from other editions–saving throws while dying to become stable, a negative hit point threshold based on Constitution score, you get the idea.

Even with my “generous” modifications, character death remains fairly common in my game. My buddy Chris is starting his fourth character this upcoming Sunday. Although he’s into the game as he is, he didn’t bother to change class or race this time. He just rolled his scores and changed the name. I don’t blame him. His first character, a fighter, was devoured by a giant lizard. His second was ripped to pieces by ghouls. And his third was ripped to pieces by the same ghouls! Yet he’s still having a blast. (He’s a curmudgeon and he never candy-coats feedback, so I don’t think he’s holding back on any resentment or frustration.)

This left me scratching my head. Obviously, some players would become frustrated after losing three characters in a row. Some players might change their play style, becoming more cautious, guarded, or even unwilling to take risks at all. Others might just up and quit. Not Chris. He comes back for more. Chris’s good nature, I’m certain, covers a lot of what’s going on here, yet I also think that the story’s strength and speedy play also contribute. After all, when a person plays a video game, he or she just starts over when the character dies. If you’re playing Angry Birds, you don’t throw your phone across the room if you don’t manage to get 3 stars on the first try. If your character dies in AD&D, throw some dice and you’re back in.

This may be true for my current game, I think it becomes less true when the barrier to entry is higher. A player can create a human fighter using the 1st Edition rules in about 5 or 10 minutes (this assumes you don’t bother trying to make sense of the grappling, pummeling, and overbearing rules, and you don’t have scores high enough to even bother rolling for psionics), even less if the player knows the game. As we progress through the editions, character creation time increases. You add kits and proficiencies in 2nd Edition, more complex ability score distribution and character points in Player’s Option, skill points and feats in 3rd Edition, power selection and theme in 4th Edition, and so on. More choices mean more flexible character creation yet at the expense of a higher barrier to entry. If it takes you 5 minutes to create a character, death is annoying, especially if you’re attached to the character (but really, how attached is anyone to a 1st-level character), but not enough to rage-quit. If it takes you an hour to create a character, death is damned annoying, enough to rage-quit if you find yourself having to invest your fourth hour into character creation just to play. (Ultimately, this is how Rolemaster broke me.)

An interesting side-effect of more complex characters is a growing pressure on system design to insulate characters from death. You can see it in how hit point values have inflated over the years. Take a 1st-level human fighter with a 14 Constitution. In 1st Edition, this fighter has 5 or 6 hit points, and in 2nd Edition, has a 10 hit point safety net for when the fighter drops to 0 hit points or less. In 3rd Edition, this fighter starts with 12. In 4th Edition, the fighter starts with 29 (15 + 14) plus a reserve of 77 more hit points from healing surges, and doesn’t include the safety net. Durability more or less keeps pace with the challenge of creating the character in the first place.

A system that increases character complexity almost certainly becomes more complex to address the raft of character options and interacting mechanical objects. In other words, the system gets bigger and slows down. One hit point for a 1st Edition fighter represents 20% of his or her total durability. One hit point to the 4th Edition fighter represents 0.1% of his or her total durability. This means an attack from a longsword (4.5 damage) is terrifying to a 1st Edition character and means nothing to the 4th Edition character. There’s something interesting here (something about just what exactly hit points are and what place characters occupy in the world), but I’ve gotten off track.

The point I’m chasing is this. The AD&D was cumbersome with all its sub-systems and creaky task resolution methods, but it was fast. Fast like a trip to the bathroom after eating Taco Bell for six weeks straight. A character stood a reasonable chance of dying in almost any combat. Remember, if 1 hit point is 1/5 of your character’s durability, you’re in deep trouble even when you’re fighting Cletus the One-Armed Bandit who’s using a club. If, however, the character dies, you probably haven’t played him long enough to become comfortable, to become complacent. If you’re facing death at every turn, your play style changes. When you square off against 10 goblins, you don’t scoff, you don’t shrug it off, you roll initiative and beseech the gods and goddesses of fortune to bless you with a high result. You don’t fight to the death. You fight until you don’t dare risk taking another hit and then you run like hell. Those ghouls you fought at 1st level stay scary for the rest of your career. Why? Because even after you’ve gather five Hit Dice and have a respectable 22 hit points, you know that ghoul can shred you with a little luck. And then it’s back to the beginning unless your buddies can find a willing cleric to raise you from the dead. If they can dig all your pieces out of the ghouls guts. If they themselves weren’t torn to pieces. And you know what’s also great? You’re delighted when you reach 2nd level, when your hit points increase by an average of 5.5 and you’re 5% more accurate than you were before you rubbed out the 1 and replaced it with the 2. And that moment when you pull the +1 longsword out from the dragon’s treasure horde you reached by tricking the dragon to leave its lair long enough for you to sneak in, grab what you can carry, and run off before it comes back? That moment? That’s one you’ll tell your kids about.

This play style isn’t for everyone. Hell, I’m not even sure my players will stick with me for more than a few levels, but for me, this is the D&D game I love most. It’s the game of wits, of skill, and imagination. It’s the game when you never know if that little character scribbled on your sheet’s going to make it to the end of the dungeon. This is the game I had somehow forgotten and I’ve found again. And I’m loving the hell out of it.

So what do you think? Do you like to gamble with death in your D&D games? Do you prefer your character to grow into heroism or do you prefer to start as a hero and become something more? How do you like to play D&D?

Big Disclaimer: I wrote this eight months ago and forgot about it. There’s a lot of nonsense here and I don’t really believe everything I’m saying. Neither should you.

That’s rather crude. Sorry about that. For some reason, my self-edit mode is off. Bear with me. I promise not to use language too colorful. This is a family show after all. Let’s revise. In most cooperative games, people like it when they can make a great contribution, when they do something awesome at the table. The wizard who clears an orc-filled hall with a fireball or the fighter who carves a path through a horde of goblins or the cleric who raises the holy symbol and keeps the zombies at bay long enough for the heroes to escape and reach the next room: in all cases, one player has his or her chance to make a contribution that helps everyone and also inculcates the idea that the character (and, by extension, the player) has value to the group dynamic.

Now there are lots of reasons why folks play games, lots of reasons for cracking open the Dungeon! boardgame on a lazy afternoon or rolling up a character and sitting in someone’s dining room for four to six hours slaying monsters. Our objective, as game designers, is to contribute in positive ways to the play experience that encourages the audience to engage the game again and again.

The issue I’m wrestling with is the mechanical and narrative content design produces and how the audience relates to that content. Creating content that makes the game harder to play and less fun, no matter what simulation value that content has, only acts as an obstacle to achieving the level of investment required to sustain the game. For example, when I worked on The Black Company Campaign Setting for Green Ronin, I aimed for a freeform magic system that reflected what was going on in the novels. Magic in that world does not, in any way, resemble the Vancian system that powers D&D. Imagination was key and you could do pretty much whatever you wanted within the bounds created by talent and training. So I constructed a complex magic system that could give players the same level of control over the types of spells they cast. This system became the foundation for True Sorcery, a rulebook that came out a few years later.

Some folks dug that system and I  feel it did the job. After several years of experience, I look back on the mechanics and scratch my head. It is playable. It does what I wanted it to do. However, it’s hard. It’s way too techy and it creaks like crazy when you try to work with it. Instead of creating something that could enable players to do cool, fun stuff, I created additional barriers (complexity, difficulty, and limitations on effect) to, basically, blowing shit up. If I could go back knowing what I know now, I promise there would be a vastly different and easier system that would start with an escalating damage value modified by training and talent (using feats and class features). The system would then have a smaller set of effects weighed on damage equivalencies. For example, a touch attack that deals 1d8 lightning damage might become 1d6 lightning damage when turned into a ranged attack or 1d4 lightning damage if it could affect one or two targets. Or, I might just jettison the whole thing and distill everything down to a Magic check with DCs set by how far the magic bends or breaks reality. A lightning strike dealing X damage, might be a DC 5 Magic check. Destroying a castle in one shot might be a DC 50. Freezing the sun overhead could be a DC 150. You get the idea.

Too often Game Masters (and game designers) construct mechanics and situations to prevent people from doing something cool at the table. I could waffle here. I could give you all sorts of exceptions to what I’m starting to see as true. But I won’t.

Why? Simulation. At some point, somewhere, someone came up (consciously or not) with the idea that simulating the real world in what is in fact an exercise of imagination is somehow both fitting and proper. Of course you can’t jump thirty feet straight up in the air. Of course you can’t throw a fireball that causes the mountain to explode. Of course you can’t walk into Odin’s throne room and make him your bitch. We want believable protagonists. We want individuals who struggle, who persevere, and eke out a narrow victory. Otherwise, it’s just pretend.

I’m sure anyone who was a child (and I suspect a few folks out there were never children) might recall those escalation games. My shotgun takes out your pistol. Yeah, my missile takes out your shotgun. Oh yeah, my death star destroys your planet. But I have the super death star and it’s made of neutronium B (both a fantastical power source and a fine dietary supplement). Oh yeah… and on and on.

Roleplaying games without restraints just become this sort of thing. That’s why we have rules (and why folks like me get paid). That’s why in nearly all roleplaying games, players have to walk the well-paved road that takes them on the hero’s journey, with all the touristy sights and traps along the way. That’s why you start at level 1 and end at level whatever.

Simulation may constrain the imagination, but it also does something else. It provides the framework in which characters grow.

Characters need to evolve. They need to respond to circumstances in game and be changed by them. We see this in other media. In films, books, and, shockingly, in real life. RPG characters need to evolve too. It keeps them interesting. It helps them become more realized individuals. Games handle character evolution not by challenging the player through narrative methods—difficult emotional or social or situational conflicts in which the player must find a solution that does not devolve into wholesale murder—but through combat. Fighting becomes the central conflict in the game and how the players address that conflict and whether they survive it determines the degree to which their character grows. Unlike fictional characters, such growth does not mean a psychological or spiritual revelation (though I suppose it can) but instead it reflects a gain in personal power. A character might acquire a new feat, more ranks in a skill, a cool power designed to create carnage, or a destructive magic item perfect for spreading the slaughter. These rewards feed the player’s hunger for blowing shit up and it’s something that has served the hobby well for over thirty years.

I’m not at all objecting to this idea that growth = more killing. Hell, there’s nothing I find more satisfying in a game than playing a hulking barbarian who carves a bloody path through a horde of goblins or blowing a hole through a dragon before it gets to puke fire all over you. That’s where the fun happens. That’s where you, as a player, truly feel the risks that make the rewards all the more satisfying.

Rob! You’re wrong! Not every game out there puts combat front and center. What about Paranoia? Call of Cthulhu? The current Indie game darling?

Yes, yes, you’re very smart. There are games out there where combat is not the central conflict. Certain games internalize the conflict for the characters so they must wrestle with some drawback or impulse until they master it. Other games make the investigation the central conflict, the horrible discovery that leads to the story’s climax. Or,  sometimes the conflict occurs between the characters, each vying against the other while still, as a group, try to stumble through the plot. Yep. Conflict can exist outside combat. In such games, though, I find character growth may become stunted. Once you figure out how to stop chewing on young peoples’ necks, you’ve achieved what the game expects you to achieve. You’ve managed to control the beast within. Further growth (experience) manifests as more dots in your attributes, dots that translate into cool powers, which, in turn, let you do more stuff in the game. Hmm. Cool powers and doing more stuff in the game sort of leads us back to the same kind of character growth you have when you can kill more goblins with each swing, yes? I mean, being a vampire who thinks of baseball whenever confronted with a smooth, soft, neck containing a pumping artery just waiting to spill its bright blood, and somehow manages to keep his/her teeth in his mouth, has to do something in the game, right? So! It’s off to murder a few werewolves, constructs, ghosts, other vampires, demons, and so on.

Lets take another popular game. You start off as an investigator. In this game you don’t want to know more. You don’t want to delve too deeply into power. That ways lies madness. Instead, you tiptoe around the forbidden and try to sort out the peril threatening your remote New England town until A) you die, B) you start flinging poop at the walls, C) you die, D) you go batshit crazy, E) you more or less keep the evil at bay, F) all of the above. The more you learn, the more powerful you become in this game, the less control you have over your character until you find yourself setting it aside and making up something new.

In Call of Cthulhu, the object is to not blow shit up but rather to have something horrible blow your shit up. It’s a waiting game in which you go for as long as you can until you die or go nuts. I’m sure other games provide similar stories. Yet do they have the same replay value as the more traditional RPG experience? If your investigator is just going to die or start playing with his own poo in every story, the experience might weigh on you after a while. Sure, the atmosphere, the discovery, and the story elements always remain attractive, but characters tend to be mechanically static, at least until things go horribly wrong. I know I enjoy CoC as much as anyone, but there’s part of me that just wants to murder Cthulhu and ride a colour out of space on a trip to crazy land.

Then there are the fringe indy games. You know, the ones that present challenging situations, such as roleplaying a couple who go through divorce (fun!). I’ve been tempted by this style of design myself. I’ve had a concept where two players play conjoined twins who hate each other. Game play involves making the twin miserable without killing the other, since death of one means the death of both. These games all live on the edges of RPGs. They have their fans, they have their devotees, and they don’t, really, figure into what I’m talking about. Such RPGs sacrifice extended play and replay value because the experience lives within carefully constructed boundaries. How many times can you play Dogs in the Vineyard? Can you imagine investing yourself in that game for six months or a year? No. You play to play and when you finish, you set it aside and play something else. There’s real appeal in that approach. You don’t need a slew of supplements to keep the interest burning. You don’t have to worry about simulating every aspect of the world. You only need to focus on the game’s story and that’s enough.

But that has nothing to do with blowing shit up, now does it?

A nicer way of saying the above is that players in traditional RPGs want to make meaningful contributions. Blowing up stuff is just the most common manifestation of the meaningful contribution. For some players, maybe it’s enough to portray the character’s ennui in a moving manner. If, however, waxing about the character’s feeling for an hour does nothing except bore the red dragon, I would argue that sort of portrayal is masturbation and not, in fact, a meaningful contribution.

I’m all over the place, I know. Let’s pull this in a bit. In D&D, the player characters go into nasty locations, murder everyone inside, and take their stuff. That’s it. That’s what it says on the tin. That’s what you get inside.

(Some folks have different expectations about this game, which I find very strange. My favorite is when folks clamor for robust rules for running businesses in D&Dland. That sure sounds like fun to me. Hey Phil, we’re going into to the Tomb of Horrors this weekend. Ah sorry guys. I’m sure my rod of wonder would help, but I can’t go. The gnomes in Potatoland just put in an order for thirty pairs of size 13 shoes and I have to work all night to complete the order or my business will be ruined! Go on ahead without me. Good grief! What the hell kind of game is that? But I digress.)

So if the game is all about killing monsters and taking their stuff in a wide range of weird an unhappy places (tombs, ruined castles, walmarts, and so on), then characters contribute to game play by collecting abilities that help them contend with whatever threats they face along the way. A rogue might contribute by being real good at sticking a knife in the back or picking apart traps. A fighter might contribute by hacking down everything in her reach. The wizard contributes by knowing stuff about the world and casting life-ending spells such as fireball, lightning bolt, and power word tickle OR casting spells that help folks bypass noncombat challenges and obstacles and so on. And then there’s the cleric. Ah the class no one wants to play. This poor schlep contributes by running around and healing everyone. This might be fun for some folks, but it sure as hell is not for me.

Why? Because a cleric who does what he or she is “supposed” to be doing isn’t blowing shit up! In pre-4e, the cleric might want to prepare flamestrike, but has to sack the spell to cast some version of cure wounds instead. Go back to 1st or 2nd Edition, and the cleric player had to choose all the healing he or she could or face the accusatory stares from the fighter player when his or her character ran out of hit points. So, rather than do something interesting on his or her turn, the cleric player got to spend the night keeping people on their feet. The player’s contribution was to ensure other people got to contribute. Fun!

Now, I’ll admit, some folks out there in gaming land find it satisfying to roam imaginary dungeon corridors and rather than blast bad guys with divine vengeance, they act like little Dutch boys and girls with fingers in wounds to ensure their friends don’t bleed out. And if that’s your game, good for you. For the rest of us, however, playing the cleric sucked. It was necessary for the table, but it also meant that you might make an attack or two each fight and then dump all your spells patching wounds. Boring, right?

So 3rd Edition’s solution was to simply make the cleric more awesome. You could swap out the interesting spells as you needed for the healing everyone expected. Oh, doing so still gobbled up your attack for the round, but, you could fire off a bull’s strength and get a +ridiculous boost to your Strength all day (or for one encounter depending on which version you played). You could fire off a flame strike and burn the bad guys to ashes, but you still wound up casting cure embarrassing wounds instead. And if you were the asshole (and I was) who refused to heal your allies, then you suddenly became the most powerful character in the party.

So that brings me to 4th edition land. Say what you want about the game, but for Pete’s sake (and by the way, Pete’s a nice guy and a talented game designer; send him fan mail) clerics can do more than run around as Healbot 3000. Rather than sacrificing all their contributions to keeping folks on their feet, they got to actually make attacks, hurl beams of lasery-death at foes, and buff their allies. Better still, their allies could take care of their own injuries if they had too and there are plenty of classes that can share the burden of being the healing whore. Ah, what a relief.

After these two thousand or so words of rambling, let me get to the point. Players, for the most part, play because they want to have fun. The game system can support this by eliminating obligations to play in a particular style (i.e., one player sacrifices his fun because the party has to have a damned cleric) and bake in other mechanisms to ensure that everyone gets a chance to contribute in they way they like.

As much as I loved 3e, I loathed the mandatory class mentality that somehow survived. Oh, I suppose you could do without a cleric. The adventures just become a lot shorter, usually with everyone dead. You might even make do with a druid, though the poor tree-hugger doesn’t get to cast the fun stuff and has to prepare all the healing spells instead. And the bard? Aw, who are we kidding. The bard was about as useful as having a commoner in the party. I kid, Miranda, I kid.

All this mindless ranting gets us nowhere without a few nuggets of advice.

Players: Play what you want. Look for ways in your games to do something cool. Stop searching your skills, feats, and powers for the perfect thing to do and just do something that sounds fun, interesting, and appropriate for your character to do.

Game Masters: Relax. It’s a game. Don’t fret about perfect simulation. If a player wants to jump through a window, deal some damage and let it happen (a hard lesson I had to learn as a DM). Think about the PCs. Create opportunities for them to do something neat, even if that something involves blowing shit up. And above all, remember this is a game. This isn’t your time to put on your writer’s cap. You’re an entertainer. So entertain.

I’ve tried to go back to 1st Edition before. The experience was anything but pleasant. At the time, I thought I would use everything: Proficiencies, classes from Oriental Adventures, the Unearthed Arcana, and, of course, the rules as written, which includes Pummeling, Grappling, Overbearing, and Psionics. We made characters (a process taking over an hour) and promptly blew all four tires when we rolled initiative. See, through the filter of years and four editions, we all had different takes on how to play the game, different house rules that created significant static in how to play. The next session, we switched to 2nd Edition. And the session after that, we went back to 4th Edition.

Last night, though, I was committed to trying it again. We steered clear of the Unearthed Arcana, non-weapon proficiencies, and anything else I knew would wreck the game. The only mishap during character creation were the unarmed combat rules, which merely succeeded in ensuring no one would dare try to throw a punch.

Party composition included a human monk, human magic-user, half-elf fighter/cleric, human fighter, half-orc fighter/assassin, and human ranger. For most of the night, we didn’t roll a single die. Pure, solid, awesome roleplaying in the city of Verbobonc. As the night came to a close, the adventurers on the road to Hommlet to find the missing Bezul, I rolled for random encounters, resulting in a pack of 8 wolves. Everything was fine and then it wasn’t. Initiative, surprise, casting times, speed factors, referencing charts and tables brought back a lot of unpleasant memories. Add to this the slaughter that ensued–the adventurers did not fare well against the starving wolves, and the night ended on a slightly sour note. So this morning, I’ve started cobbling together some house rules to speed up play. I’m attaching them here (ADD_House) in case you want a look. These are a work in progress and I imagine I’ll be tweaking the mechanics bit by bit until the game play reaches a point I can be happy to run it every two weeks.

I’ll keep you posted on how this experiment unfolds.

I’ve been working on the next iteration of D&D for a while now. Travel, conventions, real life, and workload have conspired to chip away at the time I have available for sitting around the table and playing games. I’ve been playtesting, of course. I’ve even managed to squeeze in a board game or two, to say nothing of taking the first tentative steps back into video games. Nothing quite filled the hole left by the regular campaign and so I’ve been easing back into regular gaming. I need a gaming experience that doesn’t relate directly to my day job, something that doesn’t have the same kind of pressure intense play testing imposes. So that’s why I pulled out the 4E books and gave them another look.

Even as a fan of 4E, I grumble about some of the creakiness in 4E’s rules. I’ve never been satisfied with the magic item rules, their acquisition, or the game’s reliance on their distribution. I’ve also been frustrated with the “treadmill” effect, where numbers get bigger to no real impact on game play. DCs creep upwards to keep pace with character advancement. Higher-level monsters exist to fill holes left by lower level monsters when they drop out of the game. And, a monster’s viability in any game almost never lasts more than 5 levels since PC defenses scale far above what a monster can reasonably hit.

With these issues  in my mind, I made a couple of  changes I hope will improve game play.

Level Bonus: A player normally adds one-half his or her character’s level to checks (ability and skill), defenses, and attack rolls. A monster’s check modifier, defenses, and attack rolls  always equals some number (determined by role) plus its level. It should be obvious if PCs grow at a rate of one-half level and monsters grow at a rate of level, there’s a gap that grows wider and wider over time. Magic items shoulder the burden of filling the gap. The game expects PCs to earn a magic item four out of five levels. Of those, one delivers accuracy improvements, one delivers AC improvements, and one delivers FRW improvements. Leaving one magic item slot to improve the character’s ability to perform specific ability-related tasks. Generally, gloves boosted Strength or Dexterity-based tasks, belts boosted Strength or Constitution-based tasks, headbands and orbitals boosted Intelligence-based tasks, and so on.

I wasn’t on the 4E design team, but I can imagine this approach sought to solve some fairly big problems that revealed themselves in 3.5. Monsters in 3rd Edition were built somewhat independent from player character power. Challenge Rating was more guesswork than it was hard math based on expected outcomes derived from accuracy, damage output, and resource expenditures. This led to some weird results. Two CR 4 monsters could offer the same XP reward and yet one was often far more difficult to defeat than the other and thus consumed a greater chunk of PC resources.

The math behind 4E monsters generally mirrors the math underlying PCs. There are rough spots, but monsters of a particular level more or less consume the same number of resources combat after combat. This approach gives designers better insights into predicting game play, but at the cost of a feeling of sameness that seems to pervade the game. If every fight of n level consumes x% resources, it doesn’t really matter what monsters the DM uses provided the monster is of the same level.

As good as the intentions were, pressure on magic items to allow PCs to keep pace with the monsters took away one of the most vital jobs from the DM—treasure distribution. You could hand out treasure like you did in previous editions, but the effects were significant in game play. Delaying when the fighter got his magic weapon meant the character lagged behind right out of the gate. Furthermore, since magic items were integral to character development, the wish list became an essential component to magic item distribution and almost always led to disappointment when the DM decided not to give the players everything they asked for.

Even with the most liberal magic item distribution, the gap was still wide. A 5th-level PC has n + 2 defenses. A monster of equal level has n + 5 accuracy. Even with a +2 amulet, the PC is still behind by a point. And so, to throw more gravel into the gap, “math feats” crept into the game. Feats to boost defenses, accuracy, and so on began to populate feat lists. Although this helped player characters keep pace, it diminished what feats were supposed to do—provide customization beyond class and race.

Face with this, the solution seemed pretty obvious to me. Ripping level bonus out of the game meant I could stretch low-level monsters to higher levels since the game wasn’t promoting PCs out of fighting certain monsters. And, I could get away with using higher level monsters since defenses and accuracy stayed close throughout the game. I could also distribute magic items in whatever way I wanted and whenever a character got one, it meant a meaningful upgrade.

The effect of this rule is that players do not add 1/2 level to their characters’ defenses, attack modifier, initiative modifiers, ability modifiers, or skill modifiers. Monsters and traps and hazards reduce their defenses, attack modifiers, initiative modifier, ability modifiers, and skill modifiers by their level.

Training Bonus: In addition to ripping out the level bonus, I also dropped the training bonus from +5 to +3. The +5 bonus eclipses the character’s ability modifier. This creates some weird distortions in the game. I honestly feel that bounding 4E’s accuracy means this bonus should be even smaller, but we’ll give +3 a spin.

Monster Hit Points: I’ve talked before about how draggy the game can be using hit points as written. Monsters have a bit more hit points than they need and thus the tension in combat drops off after the 3rd round. Increase monster damage output (in the Monster Manual 3 and on) has helped, but monsters still live too long.

My last system change was to adjust monster hit points down in a big way. The formula I’m using is as follows based on monster role (n = level):

Artillery, Lurker: (n + 1) * 4 + Con score

Controller, Skirmisher, Soldier: (n + 1) * 6 + Con score

Brute: (n + 1) * 8 + Con score

These numbers may still be too high, and I am thinking about dropping the multipliers by 2 for the next session. Here’s what the changes look like: A 5th-level lurker with a 14 Constitution has 50 hit points using standard monster math. Using the above math gives the monster 38 hit points. Dropping the multiplier to 2 more gives the monster 26 hit points. Hmm. This might be too low.

In the end, I’m just screwing around with the game to make it more palatable to my evolving tastes. I’m interested in seeing the repercussions of these system changes and I anticipate there will be complications—the math feats are too good in this model and all accuracy and defense boosters should live in the paragon tier or go away entirely. We’ll see.

Looking around this place, it’s clear to me neglect is not a strong enough word. I have ignored this site and it makes me sad. What happened? 2011. That’s what. Life took a sharp turn and I spent much of last year focused on my personal life and salvaging what I could. By the time I had things more or less held together with bubble gum and paper clips, I was working on the next iteration of the game. Regular trips to Seattle, extensive design and redesign and re-redesign, playtesting, and, of course, drinking, have spread me a bit thin. Despite some hiccups and complications, I think I’m ready to start talking again.

There are a couple of things I should get out of the way first. I’m not going to be talking D&D Next here. If you want my thoughts on that stuff, you should head on over to the Wizard’s [site] or follow me on Twitter, which are my two outlets for talking about the game. Instead, I’m going to talk about beer, metal, rekindling my passion for gaming, flicks, and whatever else comes to mind. I hope you keep reading and thanks for your patience over the last 18 months.

Rob

My first experience flying in the modern age was to Gamicon IX in ’03 or ’04. I hadn’t flown since I was in high school, and that was an up and down trip to South Carolina  back in 1991. So I was unprepared for the astonishing adventures flying entailed. From camouflaged soldiers carrying M-16s in the early years to being hosed with radiation as a perk when moving through security to the cramped seats, mythical direct flights, and loss of meals and in-flight entertainment (aside from the slightly unhinged, manic songs sung by flight attendants on Southwest Airlines, if you’re lucky enough to encounter one of those nitrous-high freaks who thinks it his or her task to provide a variety show during take off, landing, and throughout the delightful journey in a metal box flung 39,000 feet in the air for four to six hours).

That flight to Iowa City, Iowa scared the sin out of me. All my wickedness crawled out from between my toes and made a run for the door before they sealed it shut. After a few flights, I adapted to the experience, overcame my unease during take-off and landing, and learned the tricks to make the security gauntlet as painless as possible. As I’ve become a savvier flyer, my patience for the wide-eyed and dull-witted has shrunk and my empathy for my fellow human beings in airports and in the air has more or less died. My hatred for my fellow traveler grows by leaps and bounds and that’s too bad since we’re all in this together, clinging to this bright blue ball as it hurtles through space.

My most recent adventure began after spending a few days hunkered down in a borrowed cube, hammering out words between meetings in the great stronghold known as the Wizards of the Coast office building. It was misty that morning in Renton, the night’s chill lingering below the gray, overcast skies. The TownePlace Suites, a serviceable lodging, provides a shuttle to and from the airport, and I had availed myself of this fine service once more, securing passage at 8:00 AM. I wandered down from my room, dropped off the key, and stood outside, watching a few small birds forage in the parking lot. The little creatures, with their little black heads, and tiny bodies. Adorable.

The shuttle was late, but that was no problem. I had plenty of time. Almost two hours before I would join the herd of cow-eyed morlocks roaming the airport corridors with narry a thought in their heads. TownePlace has three drivers, a nice hippie dude, a nice lady, and a nice Indian man who listens to Christian radio. All three remember me by now (I tip well) and that day, the nice Indian man was to carry me to my destination.

We exchanged small talk, in the manner of old lovers, as he drove the van to the SpringHill Suites next door to pick up the second and only other passenger—a quiet man, entranced by his smart phone, and wisely flying Alaskan as opposed to my foolish choice of Southwest. A silent drive from the hotel carried us up Lind Avenue, onto some other road I can’t remember, and then up the interstate to Seattle-Tacoma Airport, a fine facility (especially compared to the suppurating anus that is Kansas City’s airport).

The driver dropped me off at Island 3, gave me the directions to the Southwest section where I would check my suitcase and pick up my boarding pass, the same directions he give me every time, and took his tip with a thanks and drove away, leaving me to make the march through the garage, up the escalator, and into the great bazaar that is check-in. The line to the check in stations was short and I had no problems getting my boarding passes and checking my bag.

Managing the Southwest Line (Pro Tip 1): It can be confusing about what you should do when you need to get a boarding pass. You can check in on line and print out your own boarding pass, thus bypassing this step completely. However, if you’re carrying a suitcase, it doesn’t magically get on the plane. You will still have to check your bags onsite. 

Often, I’ll find the line to the handy kiosks long. That’s an unhappy event for me since I want to get through this  process as quickly as possible and without the bullshit I know lies ahead like a . Here’s how this works. You need two things to make this fast. One, you need your Driver’s License (or a suitable alternative—passport). Two, you need a credit card. If you don’t have a credit card, how did you make your travel arrangements? If you’re unwilling to swipe the card through the reader because you watch the Net one time too many, then drive to your destination. To get ranks in the Fly skill, you have to surrender your privacy, your humanity, and individuality. You will be poked, prodded, shoved, and violated before you reach your destination. So don’t be a douchebag. Follow the instructions on the screen, starting with the swipe the credit card option. It will bring up your itinerary.

From there, push the boarding pass and check bags option. The screen will move to the next step, at which point you confirm your boarding pass(es). The next screen asks you how many bags you want to check, up to two. Southwest doesn’t charge you for checking bags. So check your bag. The time it takes to retrieve your bag at the carousel when you finally arrive at your destination is worth it to prevent someone like me from imagining beetles eating you alive from the inside out.

After this, while waiting for your boarding passes to print—they emerge from the slot on the bottom, much like cash from an ATM, be prepared to present your identification. The person who will take your suitcase, baby’s car seat, or box of speakers, needs to see this. Expect some light chatter about your destination. The person doesn’t give a damn where you’re going, but I suspect this is some technique to verify that you are who you say you are. You will then get a useless sticker you can use to identify your mangled suitcase when you pick it up on the other side of your journey.

Do this quickly. Be efficient. Don’t waste time with small talk. The other person hates you. I hate you. And the people behind you hate you too.

After I said farewell to my suitcase, I moved quickly away to let the person behind me check in and walked over to a row of seats that are almost always empty. I promptly retrieved my driver’s license from my wallet and then stuffed my keys, phone, wallet, and belt into my backpack. Then, I was off to security. Everything was normal, I hoped.

Dealing with Security (Pro Tip 2): The trials you face going through security should not be a surprise. We’ve been dealing with this bullshit for many years now and so you should be prepared before you get in line. If you have keys in your pocket when you arrive at the X-Ray machine, you are a twat and need to beaten with clubs. They should be inside your carry-on or, in the remarkable event you don’t have a carry-on, they should be in your hands, ready to deliver to the plastic tray as quickly as possible.

If you cannot retrieve your toiletries without opening your suitcase, you should also be beaten with 2-liter bottles filled with frozen urine. Ideally, you have these in a see-through plastic bag that you can easily drop in a bin.

If you cannot retrieve your laptop without opening your suitcase, you should be torn apart by wolves. Your laptop ought to be in hand the moment you get through the first checkpoint so you can drop it into its own bin with little trouble.

Anything in your pockets normally should have found your way into your carryon. The time to transfer your equipment is not when you have 50 people standing behind you, waiting for their turn to get exposed to radiation. I’m serious. Don’t be a douche-bag. Be alert. Be prepared. No dawdling.

The United States of America regards toenail clippers, small scissors, ammunition, butane lighters, and pocketknives as weapons. Do not try to slip them through security. Don’t be a dumb-ass. Toenail clippers ought to be in the bag you checked. This is why we check bags. If you can’t live without your clippers, drive to your destination.

Finally, you will have to take off your shoes. Do not wear cowboy boots, combat boots, work boots, or anything with buckles or lots of laces as they take time to remove. If you cannot travel without such stylish footwear, take them off before you get into line. If you have an aversion to walking barefoot in the airport, invest in socks.

I got to the TSA agent, who inspected my license and boarding passes. I make it a habit to be polite and agreeable. I don’t initiate small talk because no one wants to hear it, especially me. My agent said something like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you had someone else’s identification?” I cocked my head and said, “Not when I’m flying it wouldn’t,” or something to that effect. I immediately scanned the lanes for the shortest line and found one with one guy ahead of me. I stepped in behind him and realized he was standing there, staring off into space. He shook himself and said, “I don’t know why I spaced out like that.” I smiled politely.

This gentleman, moving in slow-motion, violated all of my rules. He had a small suitcase and bag. He emptied out his pockets in line. He forgot to take off his shoes. He had to retrieve his bin to place them inside. He almost forgot to take his laptop out of his suitcase (a cardinal sin), but remembered at the last moment. He then had to stop everything to retrieve his suitcase and fetch out his toiletry bag, which was not in clear plastic. Why would it be? Had it been, he might have moved through security more quickly. And no one wants that, right?

In the end, he was pulled aside, the contents of his bag searched. I am certain his experience with security ended with a burly man’s hand probing down his pants for buried treasure. I however, moved quickly through the metal detector, scooped up my laptop, shoes, and backpack. You’ll note I didn’t have any toiletries this time since I checked my bag and was going home. When I travel to a destination, I will have a subset of toiletries needed in case my suitcase gets lost. I also stuff this into a clear plastic bag for easy retrieval and inspection. When I return home, I dump this pouch into my suitcase, which I check, to reduce the number of steps to get through security.

After Security (Pro-Tip 3): Do not dress yourself on the other side of the X-Ray machines. Grab your things, walk the 15 feet to the seats where reasonable people retrieve their belongs and reorder their lives. You can do this without any sense of urgency since you will have the satisfaction of navigating the perils of security without offending or causing harm through your own negligence to the people behind you. From your haven, you can leisurely put on your shoes, belt, fit your license back into your wallet, place your boarding pass(es) into your pocket, along with your keys, check your phone, pick your nose, or whatever else you need to do at whatever pace you like. This is luxury. Enjoy it. It won’t last.

Come back later this week for Part 2.

I’ve written this paragraph a dozen times and deleted each one. Here’s the deal: I could go on and on about how excited I am to be on the design team, how this is a dream come true, and that sort of thing, but all that should be evident from my previous posts on D&D and my work on the game so far. Working with Monte Cook and Bruce Cordell (and everyone else involved in the game’s design and development) has been the best experience in my career and I’m excited beyond words about what we’re doing now and what will come in the months ahead.

As you have no doubt read, our primary goal is to produce a rules set that speaks to every incarnation of D&D. So if you are a diehard BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia enthusiast or have embraced 4th edition, loved 2nd edition, 3rd edition, or never moved on from 1st edition, we’re creating this game for you. Imagine a game where you can play the version of D&D you love best. And then imagine everyone plays at the same table, in the same adventure. We aim to make a universal game system that lets you play the game in whatever way, whatever style, with whatever focus you want, whether you want to kick down doors and kill monsters, engage in high intrigue, intense roleplaying, or simply to immerse yourself in a shared world. We’re creating a game where the mechanics can be as complex or as light as you want them. We’re creating the game you want to play.

We can’t do this without you, however. The open play test is crucial. You have a chance to contribute, to help us achieve our goals. So go over to www.wizards.com/dndnext and sign up. This is our game. So let’s make it the best ever, yeah?

We don’t. And here’s why. Story always trumps mechanics.  Have you every run a combat and adjusted the monster’s hit points? Have you ever fudged a monster’s attack roll when you know one more hit would kill the player character? Have you ever skipped fights or handed out treasure that didn’t quite fit in the “parcel?” Of course you have. So why do so many DMs have problems bending and twisting skill challenges to fit the story?

The problem, in my opinion, is that skill challenges look like scripts, feel like scripts, and play like scripts. The skill challenge provides several different routes to get the prize and by describing those routes, there is an implicit suggestion that they are the only routes available. A skill challenge that explains how Arcana, Athletics, History, and Thievery can all be used suggests the other skills on the character sheets are somehow not available for use and thus don’t come into play. And so, the game play adopts a curious characteristic—players either spend their time aiding the one PC who’s trained in the skill or sit quietly (or not quietly) and wait for the challenge to end so they can do something interesting. I can’t tell you how badly I want to shriek when I see players sitting on their hands because they don’t have anything to do in a skill challenge or feel they don’t because they’re not trained in the right skills.

The whole point of the skill challenge is to test characters beyond class features and powers. Thus, opting not to participate out of some fear of accumulating three failures defeats the entire purpose. A skill challenge is just a framework for how to resolve a complication that doesn’t necessarily require attack rolls and power expenditures. It is not a script, but a suggested process by which characters can overcome the problem. Players shouldn’t be guessing what skill checks they should make. Players should be thinking about how their characters will overcome the problem.

In the example I gave last week, I presented a rough skill challenge that offered a few ways players could find the secret door and thus bypass the clay golem in the hallway. The skill selection I whipped up represented the most likely choices the players might make during the challenge. However, they were by no means the only ones. Another player might have thought to inspect the walls around the painting, to see if there were any architectural clues. I might have called for a Perception check or a Dungeoneering check and if the player succeeded, then I would have gladly given out a success to reward the player for engaging the game in a way I didn’t expect. Thinking on my feet, the Dungeoneering check might have revealed a strange seem around the painting’s edge or the existence of extra structural supports or something else that might hint at the passage beyond.

In fact, if a player can come up with a good story for how a skill (or ability) might apply, odds are I’m going to let the player make the attempt. Even Streetwise, my most hated 4e skill, could come into play—maybe one of the characters remembers sitting at a tavern, sucking down ales with a veteran of the battle depicted in the painting and thus know some detail about the painting is wrong.

And, here’s something that might cause people to break out in hives: I would even skip the die roll entirely if the player describes an action in such a way as to almost guarantee success. Say an adventuring party stomps through the dungeon and finds an idol with gems for eyes. A cunning player wonders if there’s something special about the eyes and reaches up to push on one of the gems.

According to the skill challenge, the players shouldn’t even get this clue unless they first succeed on a moderate Perception check. Do I ask for a check? Or do I just have the depressed gem open the secret door? The latter of course! Why in the world would you make the players go through the process of earning four successes when they have already figured out the solution to the problem?

Likewise, say there’s a ledge 20 feet above the floor and on the chest is an iron box that holds a magic sword. A strong fighter in the party decides he want to climb up to the ledge and see what’s there. I could ask for an Athletics check, but what’s gained? I would just let the fighter climb up the wall and find the damned box. Why? Because the wall isn’t an interesting challenge. The player will just make checks until he succeeds. The player will locate the chest and get the magic sword. Yet lots and lots of DMs call for Athletics checks to climb the wall, Perception checks to find the chest, Perception checks to inspect the chest, Athletics/Thievery to unlock the chest, and so on. But why? WHY? If you put a chest on a ledge, you probably want to hide the chest from the PCs, but reward them for exploring their surroundings. The fact that they thought to climb up the wall in the first place is the only test the players have to pass. Now, you could be a dick and put a trap on the lock (perfectly acceptable in D&D-land), and that might require a check or two. But if not, why demand all the checks to give the player the carrot?

This is where many DMs have become system managers and stopped being storytellers.

Handing over the chest isn’t anything new to D&D. This is how the game has played since the start. The players describe what they want to do and the DM tells them what happens. Rinse and repeat. For some reason, both players and DMs have come to believe the game only unfolds within the mathematical construct and anything less is somehow cheating or not playing the game right. I’m certainly not saying that we should toss out the rules, but what I am saying is that the rules need to take a back seat to the story. I never want to hear in a D&D game from a player—did we reach a milestone or did we finish the minor quest or how many successes have we earned? To me, that’s jargon and it masks what is so fun and engaging about Dungeons & Dragons.

Hmm. I’m not answering the question am I? Let me try again, in brief. If the skill challenge falls apart for lack of player interest, you should just abandon the skill challenge. Your job is to excite the players, make them want to participate. A dry exercise of dice-rolling feels like work. If your skill challenge falls apart because the players can’t guess the skills to use, you’re using the SC as a script. Throw it out and ask the players what they want to do about the situation and let it unfold organically.  If the skill challenge doesn’t use Arcana and some player has come up with an interesting way where the skill might apply, don’t shut that player down. If you let the player make the attempt and the attempt winds up with a success, the player will feel awesome for coming up with an unexpected solution and the game’s story will become stronger because the player is engaged. Make sense?

Tomorrow (or the next day) Healing Surges.

I have a theory about why DMs have such a hard time running skill challenges. DMs want to run the game in the “right” way. Both 3e and 4e leave very little room for DM interpretation. If you have a question about how something works, there’s probably a rule for it somewhere. I want to climb a ladder? Well, bub, that’s a DC 5 Climb/Athletics check. I want to remember common knowledge about magic. Make a DC 10 Knowledge (arcana)/Arcana check. Combat, overland travel, and almost all the other moving parts of the game have been designed to the point that the game can more or less run itself. The “Dungeon Master” has always been something of a referee, but the role also expected the DM to be a storyteller, to bend the rules to fit the story as needed. In my experience, the more rules we have, the more “complete” the game, the less freedom the DM feels he or she has, and thus we have an army of DM engineers who exist, to some degree, to make sure the game runs as the rulebooks say it should. DMs present the information, tighten the screws, and make sure the monsters and traps behave as described.

With the DM being relegated to something akin to a game manager, it follows that DMs see a skill challenge in the same way they see anything else presented in rules jargon. The skill challenge is a mechanical procedure, some necessary hoop to jump through while chasing whatever quest they’re after. Why wouldn’t you, as a game manager, explain the rules? Why wouldn’t you just tell the players how many successes they need, what skills to use, and so on?

Because it kills the mood.  It’s a bit like going on a date only to receive a script for the entire evening, learning what your date plans to do, step by step, to get you in the sack. Not only is that creepy, but it pretty much guarantees that your date’s desired outcome will not happen. Revealing all the juicy bits of the skill challenge before the players begin has a similar effect. There’s no romance, no improvisation, nothing exciting about the experience at all. And what might have been an interesting exchange that culminates in a satisfying experience for everyone involved winds up being artificial and mechanical.

Just because game material present skill challenges as a mechanical construct doesn’t mean you have to run them this way. As a DM, reclaim your place in the game. Be the storyteller you’re expected to be and properly seduce your audience, win them over and immerse them in the narrative.  Let me give you an example.

Find the Secret Door

The skill challenge’s goal is to find the secret door. The door opens onto a passage that leads to the Evil Bad Guy’s secret lair, where he performs unspeakable experiments. If the PCs find the secret door, they can bypass the clay golem guarding the main approach to the lair. If they fail, they’re going to have to deal with the construct . This isn’t an ideal skill challenge, but it works for this example.

The secret door is a magical painting and the PCs have to activate the painting to move through it. I want to keep this simple, so the PCs need 4 successes before 3 failures. I also want to make sure there are a couple of strategies for dealing with the painting. Arcana and Perception seem to be obvious choices. I’ll throw History into the mix (the painting is a historical scene with a significant error). Thievery might be good (to sabotage the painting). As is Athletics (to break through the wall).

Five skills seem to be enough. I’ll set the Athletics DC at hard and all the other ones at moderate.

I want to structure this a bit.

Identification (Arcana, History, or Perception)

A successful check using one of these skills reveals something funny about the painting. Arcana reveals a magical aura, History some weird inaccuracy, Perception a faint breeze blowing out near the bottom. Success by 5 or more grants a +2 on all future checks related to the challenge.

Discovery (Arcana, History, Perception)

Characters examining the painting discover it covers up a passage. Arcana reveals the image can be manipulated to allow access to whatever lies beyond. History recalls a similar secret door from legend. Perception reveals a faint outline. Success by 5 or more grants an extra success.

Open (Arcana, Athletics, Thievery)

Characters can open the door. Arcana bends the magic. Athletics breaks the door down. Thievery sabotages the magic. A success by 5 or more grants an extra success.

Failures

The first time the PCs fail a check, the golem hears them. The second time, the golem moves its speed toward the PCs. The third time, the golem pulls a Kool-aid man and attacks.

Success

The PCs find and open the door.

Running the Challenge (A not-so-good way)

DM: You enter a 10-foot wide passage that extends well beyond the range of your light source. On the right-hand wall, you see a large mural depicting two armies fighting. All is quiet. All is still.

Bobby: I want to check out the painting.

DM: OK. You’ve triggered a skill challenge.  You’re going to need 4 successes and you can use Arcana, Athletics, History, Perception, and Thievery.

Dan: Uh. Okay. I’m trained in Athletics. I want to make a check.

DM: What are you doing?

Dan: Flexing?

Running the Challenge (A better way)

DM: You enter a 10-foot wide passage that extends well beyond the range of your light source. On the right-hand wall, you see a large mural depicting two armies fighting. All is quiet. All is still.

Bobby: I want to check out the painting.

DM: Sure. The painting covers about 10 feet of wall and it depicts a battle between small furred humanoids and gnomes. There’s a jagged mountain in the background.

Tom: Sounds interesting. Do I know what battle this was?

DM: You might. History check?

Tom: Sure. (Tom rolls and succeeds. The DM ticks off 1 success).

DM: This looks like the Battle of Howling Horde. You can tell because of the Stone Tooth, the mountain in the background. It’s not an accurate depiction though. The Horde attacked halflings, not gnomes.

Bobby: Gnomes. Halflings. Is there a difference? Seems strange though. I want to search the painting.

DM: Sure. Give me a Perception check.

Bobby: Gotcha (Rolls and gets a success by 5; the DM marks down two more successes).

DM: You notice a faint breeze coming from the painting. It’s weird. You think there might be an open space behind the painting.

Dan: Out of the way. I’m going to kick it down.

DM: Make an Athletics check.

Dan: Damn. Rolled a 1. (The DM notes the failure and that the golem is now aware of the adventurers).

Bobby: Good job. Let me see if I can get this open. I’d like to try open this bad boy up the old fashioned way with my thieves’ tools. Thievery?

DM: Okay.

Bobby: Ah crap. I got a 9.

DM: (The DM notes the second failure. The golem is moving toward the party. The DM checks the passive Perception scores for the entire party. Accounting for distance, the only once who hears the golem’s approach is Bobby). You fail to open the compartment, but you hear heavy footfalls and scraping coming from down the passage. What do you guys want to do?

Dan: I draw my sword and take up a defensive position.

Bobby: I draw my crossbow and load it.

Tom: This painting might be magical. I’d like to detect magic.

DM: Arcana please?

Tom: Sure. (Tom rolls well and succeeds by 5; the DM notes two successes. That brings the party’s successes up to 5, more than enough to complete the challenge).

DM: The painting is magical and while examining it you see threads of power you can  manipulate that should cause the door to open. What now? You hear the footsteps growing closer.

Tom: I’ll tug the magical threads!

DM: Perfect. The painting shimmers and fades before your eyes, revealing a long, dark tunnel.

The DM didn’t ask for the last check. The party succeeded and so there was no more need for additional checks. Of course, the players may want to deal with the approaching monster.

If you read yesterday’s post, this skill challenge might be an unnecessary one. Just because it’s in the adventure doesn’t mean I need to run it. If one of the players decided to search the painting, the DM might have just skipped the entire challenge and let the player find and open the secret door with a single successful check. Or, if the players had an easy time, the DM might just ignore the secret door and let the player characters face down the golem, which likely alerts the Evil Bad Guy and starts a larger combat encounter. Regardless, the skill challenge example shows how such a scene might unfold, with a mixture of player initiative and DM guidance.

OK. I’m done talking skill challenges for a while.

The first mistake we made with skill challenge design is to make more of them than they actually are. You can find their genesis in 3rd edition’s Unearthed Arcana as complex skill checks. A skill challenge is nothing more that a group of checks utilizing the various access points by which player characters interact with the game world and abide by an organizational structure that ought to promote tension, drama, and excitement. Thus, one should only use skill challenges in situations where the problem to overcome is more than roleplaying or a single check can solve and also stands at the narrative fork, where success leads to one outcome and failure leads to another. Of course, a skill challenge might lead to several different paths, but most have a binary outcome. Success means the adventurers achieve some narrative victory and the story progresses. Failure means the adventurers suffer a narrative setback and must find some other way to progress the story.

That’s it. That’s what a skill challenge should do in almost every situation. But this isn’t the case is it? Many traps can only be disarmed after 4 successful Thievery checks before 3 failures, when really one check should suffice. Many NPC encounters pile up required skill checks to overcome the challenge when simple roleplaying ought to resolve the situation. How many overland journeys involve skill challenges when clearly all a DM really wants is to get the heroes from point A to point B. I’m guilty of these terrible skill challenges. Hell, most people who have worked on 4th edition have put out a few stinkers. Why? Because I’m not entirely convinced we knew what skill challenges were supposed to do in the first place.

The solution? Ignore them or simplify them.

A DM should always assess all skill challenges in any published adventure he or she would run and the best criteria for judging a good skill challenge are the stakes. What happens if the PCs fail? Is there an interesting or compelling result? If not, you should either create one or just skip the challenge. For example, consider any of the “journey skill challenges.” Often, these operate only as resource drains, existing solely to tax healing surges from PCs, healing surges PCs will simply get back when they take their next extended rest. Even if the PCs have a fight or two after the challenge, most groups will hole up and rest before pushing on with the adventure. In the end, nothing interesting happens and the entire process is nothing more than an exercise in dice rolling.

Let me pick on myself.  “Siege of Bordrin’s Watch” was one of my first 4e adventures and I committed a grave sin with a few of the skill challenges. In particular, there’s the Monastery of the Sundered Chain skill challenge. My intent was to recall the wandering monster tables from the old days within the skill challenge framework. The PCs make a series of skill checks. With victory, they reach the monastery or get back to Overlook without trouble. With failure, they have to fight a randomly determined group of monsters. At the time, I thought this was a cool way to deal with overland travel. Now, I’m not so convinced.

Here’s why. Each time the group travels, the DM feels obligated to run them through the skill challenge. There’s nothing dramatic about this sequence and the consequences of failure are nothing more than simply draining away resources. A far better solution would have been to build an optional table with some roleplaying, exploration, and combat encounters. Then I should have offered basic instructions for dealing with these encounters (conflict, avoid, parlay, and so on) in broad terms. I might have a brief section on sneaking past the orc raiders, chatting up the gnoll marauders, taming the hippogriffs, and include suggested skills for dealing with each.

Or, if I wanted to preserve the skill challenge element, I should have woven the challenge into the story. Rather than make this a drain, I could have built actual stakes. For example, if the PCs succeed on the skill challenge to reach the monastery, they find Kalad the Paladin alive. If they fail, they become delayed and find his body amongst the other dead dwarves. Since time becomes a component, I would have built this as a staged challenge, where the PCs must find ways to overcome certain obstacles encountered en route. The first obstacle might have been orc scouts, the second a terrain feature, and the third a roleplaying encounter that would alert the PCs to what lies ahead and maybe foreshadow Kalad a bit—perhaps a fleeing survivor reports on what happened at the monastery.

If I were running this adventure today, I would make these changes using the material in the adventure without a doubt. Or, I would just cut the challenge altogether and instead slip in a combat encounter or maybe just describe the PCs’ journey to the monastery, skipping the challenge entirely. In this adventure or any adventure, don’t ever feel obligated to run skill challenges. If the challenge has no significant consequences, you best serve your players by cutting it, letting them get through the challenge with fewer successes or, best of all, strengthen the challenge by giving it teeth, with real consequences that shape how the adventure unfolds.

Image comes from Heath_Bar

For an introductory product to be successful, a potential customer has to be aware of the product in the first place. The customer has to notice the product on the shelf, have heard about it from someone or somewhere, and, most important, have an interest in the pen & paper style roleplaying game instead of some other activity. That’s a fairly specific group of people and one I’m not sure exists in significant numbers.

For starts, the big-box bookstores are vanishing. Yes, you can still find a Barnes & Noble here and there, along with a few smaller regional chains, but few of these stores put introductory roleplaying materials in the paths of potential buyers. The place for these products is not tucked behind the graphic novels or buried in the science fiction & fantasy section. The product needs to sit where potential buyers are likely to go: by the teen fiction, children’s books, on a display in the center aisle, visible en route to the science fiction & fantasy sections. Rare is the employee who knows anything about roleplaying games and rarer still is the employee who plays and actively works to grow the hobby.

So the burden falls to the hobby stores, but here the problem is even worse. For starts, few hobby stores, in my experience, make their money selling RPGs. Game products gather on the shelves for the occasional buyer who does not get all of his or her materials from Amazon.com. Most profits come from CCGs, comics, collectibles and so on. A hobby store is far less likely to get people off the street to wander the aisles and more likely to get people who already shop there for their own specialty item. Even the clerks with the best intentions and sales experience know to focus their expertise on the items that will sell and so most focus their “research” on the items their existing customers want. Learning and mastering RPGs takes time and interest, and, more often than not, clerks who know RPGs push the games they themselves play. If a clerk loves the One Ring, he or she’s not going to push Rifts. So no matter how good your introductory product is, no matter how sexy it looks, the products simply won’t sell if it gets lost amidst the countless other game products sitting on the shelves.

Product placement and effective selling techniques are all well and good, and I’m sure some folks manage to push these products out the door. Hell, if publishers didn’t sell these products, they wouldn’t make them right? But I doubt they sell to 9-year old Johnny with $35 burning a hole in his pocket. I’m far more likely to believe these products sell to existing customers who A) express an interest in a different game system, B) want to complete their collection, or C) want to get someone else into the hobby and believe the introductory product will do what just sitting down with the potential player and playing the game can’t.

I’m not sure the intro product serves customer A at all. While the intro product often provides a stripped down, simplified version, it misleads the customer into believing he or she has a complete product and that the product is somehow representative of the game system on the whole. If the intro product has to simplify the actual game for easy digestion, would it not just be simpler to bypass the simplification process and create a game that is just easy to learn and play? It seems strange to me to create a game with limited appeal due to excessive complexity and then go back and strip out the excessive complexity in the hopes one will lure the customer to buy into the excessive complexity later. Sure, complexity may come in the form of expanded options that could create decision paralysis for the reader, but if this an actual concern, perhaps embracing the “less is more” approach could bypass the need for the intro product in the first place.

There’s not much to say about customer B. This customer, the best kind of customer, buys whatever the publisher produces.

And last, there’s customer C, the evangelist. He or she has the best intentions, doing the grunt work of spreading the word about the game and helping create new players and fans. The introductory product, in my opinion, may be an impediment to growing the hobby. Simply giving an intro product to a kid removes the obligation to teach that kid how to play. Some folks do open up the box and guide the new player through the process, but the intro product is designed to eliminate this exchange of information since it needs to carry all the weight itself.

I think back to when I started playing RPGs and I remember very well the first books and boxes I picked up. The red box was one of my first products and I remember it felt like a game I could play for a while—three whole levels in fact. I fooled around with it a bit, but I didn’t “learn” the game until I actually sat down and played. After that initial experience, I acquired a wide range of roleplaying products, and even played some. Twilight 2000, all the Palladium stuff, Autoduel, MERP, Rolemaster, Mechwarrior, Traveller, Shadowrun, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Star Trek, Star Wars, and even the obscure Hidden Kingdom. I didn’t need introductory products to learn and play these games. I got the book, read the rules, and tried to play. If I couldn’t understand the rules, the fault lay not with the product but with me. I had to study more, try harder, and experiment with the game until I got it. The difference was that I rose to the challenge of mastering the game rather than depending on some hand-holding material to help me along. Looking back, I played through the Basic, Expert, and Companion sets before I “graduated” to the Advanced books and once I did, I never played plain old D&D again. And now, I kind of wish I had skipped over the boxed sets and went straight into the Gygaxian madness that was 1st edition.

I understand what intro sets are supposed to do. I know why we designers and publishers feel we have to produce them, but I really feel the best way to expand the hobby is through the evangelists. We should not expect some potential gamer will opt to buy the intro product on his or her own initiative, not when there are so many other ways to spend entertainment dollars. For me, the ideal product is one that teaches established gamers how to “sell” the game to new players. Rather than a simplified rules engine, my ideal intro product would present practical advice about introducing RPGs to the uninitiated, to explain what they are, offer helpful tips for creating pregenerated characters, advice for helping players create their first characters, and a basic adventure designed to show off different parts of the system. And you know what? This intro product wouldn’t even need to be system-specific. You could just construct a couple of broad adventures—dungeon delve, mystery, and so on, with guidelines for the experienced reader to adapt those adventures to whatever system he or she is teaching. This one product could be a handy tool for any gamer, regardless of game system to spread the word about the game he or she loves.

So tell me. How did you get into gaming? What was your gateway “drug?” Did someone teach you to play or did you buy an intro product, learn to play, and teach others? What intro products have you purchased? Do you still use them?  Did they help you learn to play?

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