1D e c e m b e r 2 011 | DR AG ON 4 0 6TM & © 2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC. All rights reserved.

An IntroductionLegends & Lore Archive | 2/15/2011

This week, an introduction to the column.

“If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find we have lost the future.”

—Winston Churchill

When Bart Carroll and I sat down to plan the vision behind this column, it seemed pretty simple. I’d have a chance to talk about D&D’s past and present from my own little soapbox—a fairly choice assignment, in my book. However, it wasn’t long after we announced the new column that Bart sent me feedback from a few readers. They had a fairly simple question that boiled down to this:

“We already know about the past. What we want to know about is the future.”

That sentiment popped Churchill’s opening quote into my mind. These days, when we think about D&D’s past and present, we all too often think of it in adversarial tones. 4th Edition is a lame tabletop MMO. 3rd Edition is for number-crunching losers. 2nd Edition is for setting junkies. 1st Edition is for people obsessed with polearms. Let’s not even talk about Basic D&D. Who plays that? Take your pick of invective, cast your favorite edition in the most positive terms, and you have what seems an all too common discussion on the internet and in game shops. Even when you talk about an edition (or editions) positively, there can still be an air of defen-siveness, as if you have to apologize for what you like in order to avoid making a perceived attack. We allow ourselves to open that proverbial quarrel.

Legends and LoreArticle Archive 2011by Mike MearlsMy name is Mike Mearls, Group Manager for the D&D® Research and Development team. Welcome to Legends & Lore, a weekly column where I write about various topics on D&D’s history, how the game has changed over the years, and where it’s going in the future. One of the things I want to do is pose questions and topics to D&D players across the world, because my real purpose is to understand what you think about D&D. Once I know that, then I can better understand the game.

Mike Mearls is the R&D Group Manager for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. His recent credits include Player’s Handbook® 3, Hammerfast™, and Monster Manual® 3.

Legends and Lore: Miniatures Madness

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What we forget, though, is that the path to our future stretches back through our past. I honestly believe that when Gary Gygax sat down to write D&D those many years ago (based on plenty of ideas supplied by Dave Arneson, of course), he wasn’t inventing a game so much as discovering one. There’s something innately appealing about D&D, about its nature as a roleplaying game, that made it spread like wild-fire. D&D took off and remains healthy to this day because it answers a basic human need that hadn’t been met before. It was the first game that let us share our imaginations against the backdrop of a fantastic world of sorcery and danger. It’s no wonder that so many digital games plunder from D&D’s rich history. The idea of going to another world and sharing that journey was heady stuff back in the 1970s, and it still defines hardcore gaming today. When we look at the past, we see how we played the game and learn where it started. As we move for-ward from D&D’s beginning, we see how the game changed, why it changed, and how we changed in response. When we understand the sum of those 38 years of changes, we can understand the present. We can see the big picture, the tale that extends from 1973 (the year Gary signed the foreword to the Origi-nal Edition) to today. A cycle emerges, as each version of the game represents a shift from one gaming gen-eration to the next. What I’d like to do in this column is inspect that cycle, take it apart, and use it to look to the future. In the end, understanding the past is far more than a mere bath in nostalgia. It’s about getting to the heart of Dungeons & Dragons. Whether you play the original game published in 1974, AD&D® in any of its forms, 3rd Edition and its descendents, or 4th Edition, at the end of the day you’re playing D&D. D&D is what we make of it, and by “we” I mean the DMs, the players, the readers, the bloggers—every-one who has picked up a d20 and ventured into a dungeon.

This may sound strange, coming from R&D—but it’s easy to mistake what Wizards of the Coast pub-lishes as the core essence of D&D. We might print the rules for the current version of the game, or produce accessories you use at your table, but the game is what you, the community of D&D fans and players, make it. D&D is the moments in the game, the interplay within a gaming group, the memories formed that last forever. It’s intensely personal. It’s your experi-ence as a group, the stories that you and your friends share to this day. No specific rule, no random opin-ion, no game concept from an R&D designer, no change to the game’s mechanics can alter that. When we look to the past, we learn that there are far more things that tie us together than tear us apart. The fact that we play this bizarre, arcane game puts us on the fringe of normal. Whether we like powers, feats, ascending or descending AC, THAC0 or base attack bonus, those are all details. We like to dream of worlds beyond the mundane, of great battles and victories that occur only in the shared imagination of a gaming group. To borrow from the foreword to the 1st Edition Player’s Handbook: “As diverse as this mélange of enthusiasts is, they all seem to share one commonality: a real love for Dungeons & Dragons and a devotion that few other games can claim.” This is our game, and it is as healthy, vibrant and important as we make it. The rest is details. Don’t let that details drive us apart when the big picture says we should be joined together.

Miniatures MadnessLegends & Lore Archive | 2/22/2011

This week, I’m tackling miniatures.

A Very Brief Look at Very Small FiguresAlmost continuously since the mid-70s, D&D has featured an official line of miniature figures for fighters, dwarves, beholders, zombies, and almost everything in between. After all, Dungeons & Dragons sprang from the minia-tures wargaming scene of the early 1970s. Yet while miniatures have always existed in some form with the game, not all gamers have embraced them. For every DM who owns shelf upon shelf of plastic and metal miniatures, there are others who abso-lutely refuse to let them hit the table. “Miniatures help us visualize the action and keep everything sorted,” a minis user will tell you. “Miniatures limit the imagination and compete with the DM’s description,” the anti-minis DM counter. Complicating matters, the official rules for D&D have varied over the years in how they treat minia-tures. In earlier editions, miniatures primarily served to indicate marching order. The price and limited range of metal minis made collecting every monster

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you planned to throw into an adventure daunting. Some groups used dice, bottle caps, or other markers in their place (including, quite famously dime store toys—which is how the rust monster, bulette, and owl-bear originated), but many groups simply relied on the DM’s narration and description to set the scene. It wasn’t until 3.5 that miniatures were an assumed part of a DM’s equipment. 4th Edition still lists minis as an optional component, but the combat rules are clearly written with the assumption that you’ll use them. It’s easy to suppose that this transformation took place solely in concert with rise of the pre-painted D&D miniatures line. That’s only half the story, though. A game that assumes the use of miniatures undergoes an important, though subtle, change in its design. In a recent design team meeting, we summa-rized that point with the following statement:

The battle grid and miniatures can either help the DM resolve rules issues, or serve as an independent rules resolution system.

In more practical terms, a player asks: “Does this orc have cover?” Then, does the DM decide if the orc has cover, or do the rules for cover use the grid and rela-tive position of miniatures to make that decision? In the first case, the DM learns a rule and applies it based on his or her understanding of the situation. In the second, the DM doesn’t have any say in the matter. The rule provides a definitive answer. The best example of this comes from the transition from 3rd Edition to 3.5. In 3rd Edition, the Player’s Handbook provides a table of modifiers and an illus-tration that give an increasing bonus to a creature’s AC and Reflex save based on how much of its body is concealed by cover. From the standpoint of minia-tures use, the DM decides if the pillar between you and the target orc covers half the orc, a quarter of it, or whatever. The DM interprets what’s on the grid

(or the image in his mind in the absence of minis) to make a call. In comparison, 3.5 requires a DM or player to draw imaginary lines from the attacker’s square to the target’s square. If one of those lines crosses through an object, the target has cover. Cover pro-vides a f lat defense bonus, while a DM has the option of doubling the bonus based on the situation. For instance, an orc lurking behind an arrow slit receives the superior bonus. In either case, there’s no rule for making the call without miniatures. You need minis (or a house rule) to determine cover.

The argument in favor of the 3.5/4th Edition approach (4th Edition uses the same design philoso-phy) is that everyone at the table easily and clearly understands how cover and similar rules work. A player doesn’t need to ask the DM if a creature has cover. He draws the imaginary lines and fires away with the appropriate modifier. This makes things easier for the DM, because he doesn’t have to learn as many rules. The counter is that the rule is more complex than it needs to be, because it has to create a foolproof method for determining cover without the use of common sense or description. When players can control rules, there’s a natural tendency to find ways to break them. In contrast, with the DM serving as impartial referee, you can write a simple rule that’s easy to learn and easy to apply. You don’t have to worry about strange corner cases because the DM—as part of making the judgment call required to deter-mine cover—can simple cast aside absurd results. I definitely fall into the second camp as both DM and player. As a player, I’m lazy. I’d rather just ask the DM if there’s cover and be done with it. As a DM, I’d rather learn a simple method that doesn’t require me to draw lines, mess with the grid, or otherwise break out of the action’s f low. Ironically, I like using min-iatures, but I much prefer rules as tools rather than rules as arbiters.

Legends and Lore: Setting the Pace

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Setting the PaceLegends & Lore Archive | 3/1/2011As some of you might be aware, we announced the removal of three print products from our 2011 sched-ule (which we covered in a recent Rule-of-Three Q&A). With that announcement in mind, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the product line behind D&D has shifted over time. It’s perhaps easy to expect a hardcover book or two each month in sup-port of D&D, but that hasn’t always been the case. In looking at the big picture, D&D has twisted and turned in its support over the years. The origi-nal white box was supported by five supplements released over the course of about 18 months. The first three of these—Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch

Wizardry—added more classes, spells, monsters, and magic items to the admittedly sparse lineup of the game. Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes added stats for gods and other figures drawn from mythology, while Swords & Spells introduced a set of mass combat rules for D&D. With the rise of Advanced Dungeons & Drag-ons, the emphasis shifted from rules to adventures. Much of the material contained in the first three supplements for the original edition appeared in AD&D’s three core books, released by the second half of 1979. The game then saw expansions released in the following order:

•1977: Monster Manual®

•1978: Player’s Handbook•1979: Dungeon Master’s Guide®

•1980: Deities & Demigods™ (later re-titled Legends & Lore™)

•1981: Fiend Folio™

•1982: No hardcover books•1983: Monster Manual II•1984: No hardcover books•1985: Oriental Adventures™, Unearthed Arcana™

•1986: Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide™, Wilderness Sur-vival Guide™

•1987: Dragonlance® Adventures, Manual of the Planes™

•1988: greyhawk® Adventures•1989: Second edition released

Over the course of 1st Edition’s 12 years, that’s a grand total of three core rulebooks and ten hardcover expansions. Of those expansions, six added new char-acter options. The remaining four either added more monsters or setting detail. Beyond those hardcovers, TSR primarily released adventures, boxed sets that described the major set-tings of the era (Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms®; Dragonlance’s first boxed set arrived

during the 2nd Edition era), and Realms sourcebooks that detailed specific regions. While little appeared in hardcover form, Dragon® magazine shouldered almost the entire load of new options and material. The magazine regularly fea-tured new spells, new classes, and new monsters. In some ways, it was a toned down version of modern D&D’s supplement schedule, delivered in magazine format. Still, an issue of Dragon during this era was about 90 to 100 pages long, with much of that space devoted to ads, advice, fiction, and non-mechanical elements. Perhaps about 20 to 30 pages each month were new player options. Oddly enough, while 2nd Edition saw a huge uptick in the number of monthly releases, it looks like the total number of hardcover releases comes in at about eight. I’m sure I missed a few, but outside of the Player’s Option books and the core rulebooks, not much came out in hardcover during this period. However, during this time TSR released five or six soft cover books each month. Sometimes that number would drop to coincide with a big product, like a boxed set, but it was fairly consistent for most of the decade. Many of those books focused on specific set-tings, others were adventures, and some were generic supplements aimed at all D&D players, such as the Complete Fighter’s Handbook. Still, in terms of total volume of releases, the pace shot through the roof. 3rd and 4th Editions reversed the 2nd Edition trend, with few soft cover books sprinkled among a steady stream of hardcover books. While early sup-port for 3rd focused on soft covers, the release of 3.5 saw an almost complete conversion to hardbacks. Continuing a trend started in the 1990s, this era saw only a scattered release of adventures after the initial adventure path. Gamers had to rely on Dun-geon® magazine, in its print or digital format, for adventures.

Legends and Lore: Setting the Pace

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Prose and ConsAll of that history brings us to an important question. At the end of the day, how much new material for D&D should we here at Wizards of the Coast produce each month? More importantly, how much material should Wizards produce that you could directly use in your campaign? D&D is a fundamentally creative game, requiring the players to create characters and the DM to build a setting and craft adventures. You could easily argue that a big part of playing D&D is making stuff up. Beyond the basic rules, players and DMs don’t need anything. On the opposite end, you could instead argue that D&D presents such a vast range of possibilities that there is virtually no limit to the number of adven-tures, character classes, spells, and so on that could prove useful to a group. Looking at it from a production viewpoint, more content naturally yields more errors and inconsis-tencies. Even if Wizards added more designers and editors, the sheer volume of information makes moni-toring and coordinating everything a challenge—as you produce more content, the chance for an error increases at an exponential rate, rather than a linear rate. However, you can also argue that while more mistakes might creep in, the total volume of content counteracts that. You might have mistakes, but you have enough stuff in total to make up for them.

Complexity stands as perhaps the biggest argu-ment against a rapid release schedule. One of the things R&D must consider is what it’s like for a new player to enter a store and pick up a D&D product. If that new player is greeted by a wall of books and boxes, buying into the game becomes that much more daunting. It’s easy for an experienced player to navigate that maze, to understand that the Player’s Handbook is the key to getting started while Complete Warrior™ and Martial Power™ are optional expansions. However, that isn’t clear from their titles or even how they are arranged in the store. Compare that to many board game lines, where the core set is in a bigger, more expensive box and expansions in smaller ones. That might seem like a minor detail to an experi-enced gamer, but such visual cues are really helpful to beginners. It’s easy to understand that the big box is a starting point and the small box is an expansion.

Finally, even for experienced players too much content can prove troublesome. A small list of spells is on one hand limiting, but on the other it provides a familiar starting point for talking about the game. One of the things I miss from 4th Edition is the ubiq-uity of certain effects. Fireball and invisibility were not only wizard spells, but they also served as monster special abilities. You could identify and understand them in play much easier than, say, comparing powers from two different classes. A smaller set of mechanics, especially if those mechanics are used for a variety of purposes, can create more cohesion between players and DMs. At the end of the day, the only right answer is the one that you, the audience, settle on by purchasing or avoiding materials.

Edition Steps Total Steps

1st Weapon Proficiencies: 4 Calculate attacks against AC Fill in saving throws

6 steps

2nd Weapon Proficiencies: 4 Weapon Specialization:

pick 1 at the cost of 2 proficiencies

Non-Weapon Proficiencies: 3 Calculate THAC0 Fill in saving throws Calculate non-weapon

proficiency totals

11 steps

3rd Feats: 2 Skill Ranks: 8 Calculate attack bonus Calculate saving throws Calculate skill bonuses Calculate initiative Calculate touch AC Calculate f lat-footed AC

16 steps

4th Feat: 1 At-Will Powers: 2 Encounter Power: 1 Daily Power: 1 Background: 1 Skills: 3 Calculate attack bonuses Calculate defenses Calculate initiative Calculate skill bonuses Calculate healing surge total Calculate surge value Calculate bloodied value Calculate passive Perception Calculate passive Insight

18 steps

Legends and Lore: Stay Classy

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Stay ClassyLegends & Lore Archive | 3/8/2011

Character classes were perhaps one of the biggest innovations by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. It says a lot that we take the concept for granted across many genres (especially when you consider class and level to be two separate mechanics). Team Fortress, Mass Effect, and World of Warcraft all make explicit use of classes. You could argue that even games like Magic: the Gathering®, Halo: Reach, and Mario Kart use class-like structures to give players more options. Games like Chess gave different abilities to different game pieces, but D&D was the first to extend that to players. Flipping through the various rulebooks over the years, it’s clear that classes have undergone a tremen-dous change. Let’s take the fighter as an example, starting with 1st Edition and moving through the AD&D branch of the game*. Back in the day, as a fighter you rolled 1d10 per level for hit points, had access to all weapons and armor, and had the most accurate attacks. At higher levels, you gained access to a small army and a parcel of land to rule over and tax. As the editions moved on, the fighter gained more and more elements to play with. Let’s compare a 1st level fighter between 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Editions. In the table below, I’ve sum-marized the basic steps needed to build a character,

setting aside those decisions that all characters have to make in every edition, such as ability scores (rolled or bought), race, alignment, equipment, and so on. However, I added elements beyond the fighter class that are present in one edition and not others, such as feats and any calculations for attacks, defenses, and others. For total steps, I counted each individual decision or calculation as one step. For instance, a 1st Edition fighter picks four weapon proficiencies. I counted that as four steps, since that is four decisions.It’s interesting to watch that list grow, and even more interesting when you realize how much more math is in play. For instance, a 1st Edition fighter had to write down a series of numbers from an attack table found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Any attack bonuses from Strength or Dexterity (available only for scores of 16 or higher) were easier to apply on the f ly. Armor Class consisted of looking up a number on a table and applying a modifier if your Dexterity was higher than 14 or lower than 7. Compare that to a 3rd or 4th Edition fighter, who must add together a variety of modifiers for AC, attacks, defenses, saving throws, and so on—few of which are simple table look-ups, and almost all of which are dependent on other choices such as feats. On top of that, those choices grew only more complex. Choosing weapon proficiencies is fairly simple. You can look at the weapon table, find a few armaments you like, and write those down on your character sheet. A feat, on the other hand, requires

Legends and Lore: The Incredible, Expanding Gamer Brain

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you to read through a dozen or so choices, consider their effects, and note the modifiers or ability that each chosen feat adds to your character. A feat is active—or at least requires an active calculation or modification to a character; as you gain more of them, they build on each other. In contrast, choos-ing a weapon proficiency focuses your options, and occupies roughly the same mental space and time as buying gear. You could just as easily instruct a player to buy no more than four weapons. I’d imagine that a non-gamer looking at the above chart would wonder exactly why there are three times as many steps for making a 4th Edition fighter as a 1st Edition one. As gamers, we know that more work and options can be more engaging and interest-ing. However, the bigger question is this: Why did the game change this way? Chess hasn’t become more complex over time. Monopoly has remained fairly static year after year. What gives?

*Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, D&D was divided into two basic lines. On one side, there was aDvanceD Dungeons & Dragons with its hardcover rulebooks and more complex rules. Basic D&D was aimed at new players, though its simplicity, clear rules, and con-cise presentation have kept it a favorite for decades. Where AD&D tried to provide rules depth and complexity, Basic D&D relied more on an individual DM’s judgment and rulings to keep things moving. Of course, the Rules Cyclo-pedia introduced a level of complexity to Basic D&D that neared AD&D’s, but the basic sentiment remains the same. 4th Edition, and 3rd Edition before it, take their cues from the AD&D branch of the D&D family tree.

The Incredible, Expanding Gamer BrainLegends & Lore Archive | 3/15/2011Last week, I talked about character classes. Using the fighter as an example, I showed how the game’s com-plexity has steadily risen over the years. That trend goes far beyond the fighter. In general, each version of the game requires more math, has more detailed rules, and features more specific corner cases than the one before it. 3rd Edition combat featured many rules that were optional in 2nd Edition’s Player’s Option: Combat & Tactics. 4th Edition’s power system requires every player to understand how to read a power, apply conditions, and manage ongoing effects. When you look at games and how they develop over time, there’s a natural ten-dency to see ever increasing complexity. Picture an old Atari 2600 controller. It was a joystick with one button. Now compare that to an Xbox 360 controller. The 360 has two control sticks, a d-pad, two triggers, two bumpers, four buttons, a start button, and a select button. (At least, I think that’s what it has. I’m going off of a picture of one I found on the Internet.) That’s two elements for the Atari and thirteen for the 360. If you look back at last week’s article, you see a similar rise in the complexity of D&D. With each passing year, the game has become more compli-cated. So what’s going on here? As the title of this

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column indicates, I think we’re seeing an overall rise in player skill, more established tropes of gaming, and a better network of tutoring and knowledge. Our col-lective gaming brain has grown larger and larger, and therefore seeks out deeper, more complex games. Player skill is the easiest and most obvious factor to look at. If you started playing D&D back in 1974, you soon learned the basics of the character classes and perhaps gave each one a play. At some point, you’d start to hunger for more options. You probably also spotted a few areas where you thought a few new rules or changes would improve the game. While all of that happens on an individual level, it also trans-lates across the entire player community. As a whole, we gain more experience and learn more about games and what we want out of them. That process feeds into the next layer, the rise of tropes and clichés. This one is fairly easy to explain via an example. The first time you entered a dungeon and the character at the head of the party fell into a

pit trap, it was a big event. The fifth or sixth time you came across such a trap, you probably discovering it first by tapping ahead with a pole or searching for traps; it was something you expected. In the same manner, a lot of the rules of the game become second nature. If you understand how attack rolls work, adding a bit more complexity to them is no problem for you. Something like 3rd Edition’s f lanking is easier to understand for a veteran because it makes intuitive sense. If you surround a guy, he’s easier to hit. Since you already understand the game’s basic framework, you can more rapidly absorb and understand changes. Finally, all that knowledge spreads between players. A new player in 1974 could perhaps find a gaming tutor who had been playing D&D for a few months. Today, you might find someone with three decades of gaming. As the community develops its expertise, it also sharpens its ability to teach new players.

All of those factors point to why we’ve seen a steady increase in complexity over time. As a group, we’ve mastered the rules and started to seek more options. We’ve assimilated various tropes and mechanics to the point that they’re intuitive, provid-ing a foundation for more mechanics to rest upon. And against the backdrop of this complexity, we’re better overall at teaching the game to new players. But of course, explaining why we see complexity on the rise overlooks the real question. Is complex-ity a good thing—is the game better served by having lots of rules and options? Should it feature a lot of depth, should it remain relatively simple—or are we best served by a game that offers a broad range of complexity? I imagine that most people would prefer a game with a complexity level that they can set themselves. Traditionally, D&D has featured that by making fighters relatively simple and wizards more complex. Instead, I’m interested in hearing about your views on the different editions of D&D over time.

Legends and Lore: What’s With the Polls?

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What’s With the Polls?Legends & Lore Archive | 3/22/2011

I thought it would be useful to pause this week and talk a little bit about the polls that have been appear-ing in this column. Some folks think of them as poorly disguised marketing research. In all honesty, they’re simply an attempt to engage in a dialogue. We already have an entire department here at Wizards of the Coast dedicated to collecting data, running official surveys, and so on. Plus, I also took enough statistics in college to understand that a self-selecting audience is by no means a sound foundation for the sort of polling we’ve been running in Legends & Lore. Instead, think of this column as something similar to a virtual panel at a convention. It gives me a chance to talk about topics that interest me and, hopefully, you. The polls—and the invitation to send feedback to dndinsider@wizards.com—are the Q&A portion of the panel, your chance to react and my chance to pose a question. If you’ve been to a panel held by D&D R&D at any of the major cons, you’ve probably seen us ask how many people in the audience are DMs, how many own a specific sourcebook, and so on. Think of these polls as something like that. It’s interesting to see the answers, but we’re not about to base any major business decisions on them.

So What Do the Answers Mean?When I sat down to write this week’s column, I thought I’d look back at each poll’s results and com-ment on them. (I’m writing this on March 18th, so keep that in mind.) It’s clear that there’s an interest-ing trend at work here. It’s something you can see from the very first poll, on the difference between

grid-dependent mechanics vs. description of an area/DM’s judgment. That poll was split 50.8% to 49.2%. To put that into perspective, at GenCon we have perhaps 1,000 people playing D&D at any given moment. If those percentages held true, of that 1,000 there would be a 16 person difference between one group and the other. In the poll asking how much content you wanted to see per month, the top choice at 20% was 97 to 128 pages. About 35% wanted more than that, while 45% wanted less. While the overall trend skews low, that’s still one out of three voters who want more. A similar trend showed up on the poll asking about stripping away fighter options. About 25% of voters were per-fectly happy sacrificing options for complexity. Those numbers might seem decisive. However, looks can be deceiving. Determining how you want to play D&D is not an election, with one winner and one loser. Instead, your tastes in D&D have to mesh with those of the rest of your gaming group. This leads to what I call the gnome effect.

Gnomes, Options, and GroupsThe idea behind the gnome effect is simple. Let’s say you’re planning on releasing a hypothetical edition of D&D. You want to determine which races are impor-tant to the game, so you conduct a poll and find that only 10% of gamers play gnomes. That might make it seem obvious that you can safely cut the gnome with-out much trouble. The problem with that line of reasoning is that we don’t play D&D by ourselves. We play with a group, and when looking at rules changes or any other altera-tion to the game you have to consider its effect on the group. Let’s look back at our gnome example. One out of ten gamers plays a gnome. However, let’s say your data shows that the average group consists of five players (not counting the DM). That means, roughly speaking, half the gaming groups have one player with a gnome character. That number is likely lower, since

some groups might have more than one gnome, but it’s a rough approximation that serves to illustrate the larger principle. You cannot measure change and its effects on the individual level. You must look at it on the gaming group level. Delete the gnome from the game, or change it in a way that gnome fans dislike, and you’ve given about half the gaming groups out there a good reason to tune you out. With that in mind, we can quickly see how all of the options presented in a poll are important. In an ideal world, we would aim our design work at the most popular options but include the ability to slide along the scale from one extreme to the other. In this manner, you can be assured that in a diverse gaming

Legends and Lore: One Adventure to Rule Them All

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group everyone has the options they’re comfortable with. Even a topic such as the volume of content released per month falls into this category. Gamers who don’t want more content can easily ignore it or disallow it in their games. A theoretical D&D release schedule could focus on the middle ground of the audience, while something like the open gaming license would allow other publishers to fill in the gaps for those who want even more content. In many cases, the trick to keeping everyone happy lies in areas beyond game design. At the end of the day, to me the polls show that we have a fairly diverse audience that wants a wide range of experience out of Dungeons & Dragons. Whether discussing our publishing schedule, the game’s com-plexity, or its use of miniatures, we see a fairly broad distribution of opinions. There are clusters, but so far we haven’t seen a poll that saw one option (or set of related options) overcome the gnome effect. On that note, here are the results from last week’s poll…

Legends & Lore: Poll 03/15/2011 Results

4th Edition is:Just right: 67.9%Too complicated: 16.8%Not complex enough: 11.7%I have never played this edition: 3.6%

3rd/3.5 Edition D&D is:Too complicated: 63.2%Just right: 25.3%I have never played this edition: 8.2%Not complex enough: 3.3%

2nd Edition D&D is:I have never played this edition: 27.2%Too complicated: 26.7%Just right: 24.4%Not complex enough: 21.7%

1st Edition D&D is:I have never played this edition: 43.4%Not complex enough: 27.2%Just right: 17.9%Too complicated: 11.6%

Basic D&D is:I have never played this edition: 44.1%Not complex enough: 37.3%Just right: 17.2%Too complicated: 1.4%

One Adventure to Rule Them AllLegends & Lore Archive | 3/29/2011

In early February, I conducted an informal poll among my Twitter followers and people here in R&D. I asked them to list their three favorite D&D adven-tures. The results were fairly interesting, especially in looking at the top 10 adventures. Most impressive, though, was the sheer dominance of I6: Ravenloft. The gap between that adventure and the 2nd place finisher was as large as the gap between 2nd and 9th place. While there were clearly clusters of votes, Ravenloft stood out in a class by itself. No wonder TSR published an entire setting based around it. In looking at Ravenloft, I think it helps to look at the other adventures that ranked in the top 10. Here they are:

1. Ravenloft2. Red Hand of Doom3. Desert of Desolation4. Keep on the Borderlands5. Night’s Dark Terror6. Tomb of Horrors7. The Village of Hommlet8. Against the Giants9. Burnt Offerings10. The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh11. The Temple of Elemental Evil A few trends pop up from that list. Most of those adventures have the following: A Setting: Ravenloft is a micro-setting, featuring the village of Barovia and the surrounding wilder-ness for exploration. Castle Ravenloft, home of the

Legends and Lore: Balance of Power

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vampire Strahd, looms over the entire place, casting a shadow over everything the characters do. The adven-ture creates a sense of place and community, building up a location that the characters can use as a home base for the duration of the adventure. This approach gives a context for the narrative and allows for as much (or as little) roleplaying as the group wants. Freedom: While Ravenloft suggests a plot, it doesn’t dictate one. A draw of the cards determines key elements of the adventure, but the manuscript avoids setting specific events or timelines in place. The players are free to roleplay, explore, or fight monsters as they see fit. The DM has the freedom to run the adventure how he or she wishes. Many of these adventures simple present a situation or a place. Specific advice on how to deal with events is usually broad and directional. For example, the DM might be told that the giants (in Against the Giants, of course) rally in the main hall and form search parties to find intruders, as opposed to an adventure that lays out specific actions for each giant. The DM is free to improvise within that direction. Good Maps: In both the visual design and as interesting places to explore, Ravenloft’s maps score high grades. These adventures generally eschew linear maps, where the characters start at area 1 and move through areas 2, 3, 4, and 5 before fight-ing the boss monster at area 6. In many ways, these adventures avoid trying to create a specific story or sequence of events via the map. The DM through planning or improvisation, or the players through their choices, determines how things play out. A Unique Hook: Finally, most of the adventures on that list have a clearly defined trait that makes them unique. Ravenloft is D&D’s definitive vampire adventure. Tomb of Horrors is one of the deadliest adventures ever designed for D&D. A good hook is what pulls you into an adventure. It’s what pushes a DM to turn it from a set of pages and stat blocks into a game of D&D.

It’s All about ChoiceWhen I write these columns, I usually have only the barest idea where I’m going to end up. In this case, I’m not surprised to see that freedom of choice, both for DMs and players, comes up again and again in these adventures. A really compelling story can overcome that, but even within the bounds of a plot, players still want choice. Red Hand of Doom has a focus on a specific chain of events, but within that story there is plenty of room to maneuver. In looking at the four traits I highlighted, three of them speak specifically to choice. A setting by its nature gives you lots of options and possibilities. A good map has plenty of branches, turns, sub-loca-tions, and other areas to explore. And, obviously, one of the traits is freedom for the DM and the players to explore the adventure as they wish. In many ways, the best adventures shift themselves to match what the group wants from it. They don’t dictate anything. Instead, they’re easy to bend, fold, and alter as the group plays through them.

Balance of PowerLegends & Lore Archive | 4/5/2011Note: Special thanks to Larry Smith for inspiring this topic.

Balance is a funny concept, because it means some-thing different to almost everyone. It has been a part of the game since almost the beginning. Of course, for as long as gamers have known about balance we’ve also argued about it. At its most basic level, balance means that every player begins on an even playing field. As a concept, this is most obvious in a competitive game. When you pit yourself against an opponent, you don’t want a game that levies an unfair penalty against you or gives an unfair benefit to them. Why compete on an uneven playing field? That’s a poor test of skill. Of course, the key word is “unfair.” You might inten-tionally unbalance a game in order to account for a gap in skill between two players. An experienced player might forgo a sneaky strategy to help a new player learn a game. And some games have a luck component that might give a player an advantage in one match, but is just as likely to swing the other way in the next.

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Generally speaking, as long as a game feels fair then players are likely to call it balanced. Everyone has a different threshold, however, so one person’s balanced game is another’s broken, unfair disaster. While that basic definition of balance is nice, it doesn’t do much for Dungeons & Dragons. After all, D&D is a cooperative game. Why would we care about balance when the players are working together?

D&D: Competitive CooperationI have a personal theory about D&D, one that ties into observations that smarter designers than I have made in the past. A few years ago, I read somewhere (it may have been an article written by 3E co-designer Monte Cook) that D&D is balanced as long as players feel that they share the spotlight equally during an adventure. The rogue sneaks into the corrupt noble’s villa and steals his plans to betray the king. The fighter blocks a doorway and hews down the dretches summoned to overrun the temple of St. Cuthbert. The cleric pulls the stricken high priest back from the brink of death, while the wizard wipes a vrock out of existence with her disintegrate spell. At the end of the adventure, each player can look back and point to a moment where his or her character was the most important member of the party. Balance in D&D isn’t about giving everyone the same damage output. That doesn’t speak to the entirety of the game. It’s about giving everyone an equal chance to shine (a topic which relates to the most recent DM Experience article: “Moment in the Sun”). While in a perfect world everyone gets a share of the spotlight, the reality is that the game rarely works this smoothly. A few bad die rolls might turn a com-petent fighter into a buffoon. The rogue could pick a lock and sneak into the castle, or the party might decide instead to pose as wandering minstrels to gain entrance. However, there might be another factor at play.

I think that players have a natural tendency to seek the spotlight. When we build characters and play the game, we want that spotlight. That’s where the fun is! Of course, some players are content to play a support-ing or lesser role. A new player in a group of veterans might be too busy learning the rules to take center stage. Other players are at the game for the social ele-ment. Good conversation and funny jokes are their idea of the spotlight. Sharing the spotlight can cause problems for those who want it. When D&D players talk about balance, I think that’s what they’re typically referring to. If one class can dominate every important battle or scene, then the rest of the group feels left out. However, even that definition can vary from group to group. In a campaign that relies on lots of character interaction and intrigue, a bard might come across as a broken class. In one where the DM likes to throw single, powerful monsters at the group, the wizard shines with spells that shut down the enemy. Turn those enemies into golems (notably in 3rd Edition), and suddenly the wizard feels useless. Not only do we have definitions of balance that vary from player to player, but the structure of a campaign or a DM’s preferences can redefine balance between groups or even between adventures.

On top of all that, some folks think of balance purely in terms of the game’s fiction. A wizard might be able to level an army with a single spell, but that’s OK with them. That’s what wizards do, they’ll tell you. As long as the players understand the power rela-tionship between the classes, the game is balanced. If you want to play a powerful character, shepherd a wizard from 1st level on up. If you’re content with a fighter or rogue, that’s your decision to make.

Design and BalanceIf you’ve been following this series, I’m about to come to a conclusion that shouldn’t surprise you. I think that balance is something that depends on the group. As designers, we can take a best guess at what the typical group wants, but we can’t stray too far in any one direction. Balance and fairness are perhaps the most difficult elements of design in D&D, because they speak to our emotions. If someone feels wronged by the game, it’s hard to rely on math or design essays to convince them otherwise. At the end of the day, R&D should try to make each class feel like a viable option. There will always be some imbalance within a group, simply based on personal preferences and play styles. A wizard should feel powerful, but a fighter should have the same capacity for epic achievements and greatness. However, the greatest tool for balancing a game has been and remains an individual DM. Tailor-ing adventures and campaigns to meet your players’ needs is still the best way to give everyone a fair shake. R&D can provide the foundation for a bal-anced game, but a game that tries to mathematically balance everything against a supposed ideal may prove too limiting in scope and options for players to enjoy—especially a group of players as diverse as D&D gamers.

Legends and Lore: Fighters vs. Wizards

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in other areas. It’s common in wargames for one side to possess a big advantage in the early game, which it must exploit early on or face a grinding defeat by attrition as the other side’s strengths come into play in the late game. Collectible card games do this quite often, with some decks optimized for a quick victory and others built to hold back an opponent while cre-ating a powerful combination for the late game. That pattern of ebb and flow makes for an interest-ing game. It guarantees a lot of tension right from the beginning, rather than saving it all for the end. How-ever, it seems strange to place something like that in an

RPG. Why have some characters suffer a greater risk of death early on in exchange for greater power later?

The Evolution of Play SkillIn the early days of D&D, and to some extent through 3rd Edition, death was a cruel, capricious mistress. The luck of the die determined your starting hit points, and death awaited you at 0. Even if you used the rules for dropping below 0 hit points, such a trip meant an extended time healing up before the next adventure (the 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide required a minimum of one full week of bed rest fol-lowing such recovery).

Fighters vs. WizardsLegends & Lore Archive | 4/12/2011 Last week, I talked about the concept of balance and how it relates to Dungeons & Dragons. Probably nothing better encapsulates the issues of balance in D&D—and the attitudes around those issues—than the comparison between the fighter and wizard. From the earliest days of the game, the disparities between these two classes has served as the basis for much of what people have loved and loathed about D&D’s rules.

In the Beginning . . .In the original D&D rulebook (Volume 1: Men & Magic), this sentence leads off the description of the magic-user:

“Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magic types until they have worked up.”

Right from the beginning, we have a nice encapsula-tion of the relationship between fighters and wizards. Fighters protected wizards, who eventually became the most powerful characters. A sleep spell was often the difference between victory and defeat in the early days. Thus, wizards were carefully protected by fight-ers and other characters to preserve them for just the right time to take down a whole mess of monsters. On the face of it, this might seem like a bizarre way to design a game. However, it has some cousins

Legends and Lore: Fighters vs. Wizards

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With hit points a precious resource, save-or-die traps and monsters lurking throughout the game, and player description of actions serving in place of a skill system, play skill focused on your ability to avoid danger and stack the odds in your favor. A 10-foot pole revealed a pit trap, not a Perception check. When searching a room, you told the DM how you wanted to tear apart a desk to find the gem hidden inside. You couldn’t rely on a Wisdom check or a skill. With few hit points at their disposal, players had to carefully shepherd their spells and use strategy to set up tactically advantageous situations against mon-sters. Charging ahead, kicking in doors, and pressing on without thought was a good way to die. In this situation, play skill focused more on your ability to come up with a good plan or figure out the clues that pointed to a hidden trap or treasure. Char-acter power was at the whim of the dice, making the concept of building your character largely irrelevant. Aside from choosing class and race, you had few deci-sions to make. How you played your character, rather than how you built it, determined your chances of success. Against this backdrop, the disparity between wiz-ards and fighters make sense. The fighter was akin to playing in easy mode. You had more hit points, better AC, and access to weapons. All things being equal, when it came time to use the rules to determine if you lived or died, the fighter had a leg up at low levels. A magic-user had the worst hit points and worst AC. A single attack could kill a mage of even up to 3rd level or even higher (the most infamous exam-ple being magic-users slain by house cats). A duel between two casters of even moderate level came down to whoever fired off the first high-level, damag-ing spell. In some ways, playing a magic-user was like opting for hard mode. When you think about the game in those terms, the disparity starts to make sense. If you played in easy mode, you had a better chance of survival but a

lower ceiling of power. In hard mode, you ran the risk of losing a character in exchange for a shot at access-ing powerful spells. On top of that, most DMs forced players to roll up 1st level characters after the loss of a PC. Support for creating characters above 1st level appeared in the 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide (Appendix P) but was largely aimed at convention play, with the assumption that such characters were not meant for ongoing use in a campaign. When the rest of the group was around 6th level, marching back to 1st level was a real penalty. Not only did you lose your earned experience points, but you also ran the risk of another character death with your weak PC taking on more powerful foes. Next week, we’ll take a look at how things changed and what that means for the game. I’ll also tie that into how D&D evolves, and what that word actually means for the RPG.

Legends and Lore: Evolution and D&D

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Evolution and D&DLegends & Lore Archive | 4/19/2011

Last week, I talked about the divide between fighters and wizards in the early days of D&D. Interestingly enough, that divide remained in place until the release of 4th Edition. It seems odd that such a dis-parity in power was not only accepted, but viewed as a core part of the game. However, when we peek into the mechanics of AD&D things start to make sense.

Segments, Initiative, and Lost SpellsBack in the days of AD&D, casting a spell was a dangerous option during a battle. The initiative rules required each side to roll for initiative at the start of each round. Characters had to decide their actions before they knew the exact order they would act. Spells required time to complete, leaving a gap between your rolled initiative and when the spell actually completed. If a caster suffered damage before completing a spell, that spell was effectively

wasted—thus, a few orcs armed with bows could easily shut down a spellcaster. Unleashing a spell therefore required teamwork and a little bit of luck. In that sense, the gap between fighters and wizards felt narrower than it might appear. Without a fighter, the wizard was helpless unless the gods of initiative were kind. So if a wizard managed to unleash a powerful spell, a fighter could easily see how his or her presence in the fight made that spell possible. In addition, a fighter could always attack. While the wizard was crossing his fingers and hoping to unleash a fireball, the fighter could slice through a horde of orcs without worrying about losing his attacks. The wizard’s power felt balanced by the restrictions on its use. However, as the game transitioned to 3rd Edi-tion, the initiative system underwent an overhaul. Each individual combatant rolled initiative, the order didn’t change (unless you delayed or readied your action), and spells fired off immediately. Such changes helped widen the disparity between these two classes. In addition, spellcasters had much easier access to potions, scrolls, wands, and other items that gave them access to a wider and deeper selection of spells. Suffering damage while casting might still wreck a spell, but a high Concentration skill bonus could now also take care of that.

Character Creation and OptimizationWhile it’s easy to look at this change as the end result of a series of unforeseen consequences, I think there’s a bigger force in play. Players like the feeling of power and effectiveness that games provide them. Changes to D&D, like making it much easier to use their spells without interruption, speak to that feeling. If you want to play a wizard, you want to cast spells. If the game makes it harder to cast spells, our would-be wizard might abandon the game.

One of the big changes of 3rd Edition was its increase in the number of choices made in creating characters (also discussed in a past column). Previ-ously, you rolled your stats, picked a class, and maybe selected a few spells. If you found a magic item, you either used it or abandoned it. In 3rd Edition, you could now combine feats, skills, and spells, along with magic items you purchased, to create a charac-ter capable of a specific, mechanical trick. For many players (though not all) the play skill of the game shifted from exploring and reacting to the environ-ment, to finding the right combination of character abilities. That change flows back into the idea of making life easier on casters. If you spent hours perfecting a char-acter, it was lame that the rules would stop you from actually using your tricks. Deep character creation and optimization created incentives for the designers to clear any obstacles to making use of your chosen powers. Such a change to the game reflects how I believe evolution changes D&D. We’re used to hearing the word “evolution” bandied about as an equivalent to “improvement.” A new computer is an evolution of an older model. A weak sports team evolves into a championship contender through good draft picks and trades. However, that’s an imperfect use of the word. Evolution never takes place in a vacuum. It relies on context, the environment in which it takes place, to drive it. A species that can survive without much water can resist a drought better than one that needs more. However, that doesn’t make one species inherently better than the other; one might be better adapted to a dry climate, but under different condi-tions the other could outcompete it and f lourish. The same applies to D&D. When we think of the game’s evolution, I believe it primarily refers to how the game reacts to changes in gamer preferences and play styles. With the rise of 3rd Edition, D&D embraced character customization found in RPGs

Legends and Lore: Who Wants to Play the Cleric?

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like Champions and GURPS. It continued the trend started by 2nd Edition’s introduction of kits, vary-ing uses for proficiency slots, and the Skills & Powers supplement.

All Gaming Is LocalWith all that in mind, I believe that there is no one, true way to play D&D. The game might change to accommodate different styles and new tastes or pref-erences, but at the end of the day the “right” way to play the game depends on you and your group. Do you like building characters, or would you rather just get to the action? What makes you the most excited, a tough fight or a funny roleplaying scene? We all have our preferences. We might all play D&D, but the ways in which we play or want to play are not nec-essarily compatible. It’s a big issues facing R&D, as edition wars clearly illustrate. The video linked below talks something about this concept. I think it says much to how people relate to D&D: What We Can Learn from Spagetti Sauce.

Who Wants to Play the Cleric?Legends & Lore Archive | 4/26/2011The last two installments of this series have looked at the fighter and the wizard, specifically the balance of power between them, how it took shape, and what it’s meant over the history of the game. This week, we turn to that other spellcaster, the cleric. In the original D&D rules, the cleric’s role as a divine spellcaster is so muted that you can easily miss it. While there are a number of obvious nods, Gygax largely seemed to assume that a gamer would understand the cleric’s place in the world (for instance, the text makes reference to “faithful” men who turn out to garrison a high level cleric’s strong-hold). Avoiding all topics of religion, Gygax instead makes oblique references to law, neutrality, and chaos as a cleric’s ethos. The text also refers to anti-clerics, evil high priests and whatnot, though it does not make a definitive link between a cleric of chaos and such villains. Even in the earliest days of the game, clerics were largely tasked with support and healing with their magic. A 1st-level cleric even lacked spells, with access to weapons and armor presumably enough at that stage for a viable character. A cleric later gained access to a limited number of spells, few of which were useful as attacks. Employing the deadliest cleric spell, finger of death cast as the oppo-site of raise dead, forced the caster to become an anti-cleric. The most attractive cleric spells were the vari-ous cures, such as cure light wounds. Presumably to balance that spell against other options, such cures required a full turn (10 minutes) to take effect. Thus, a cleric who wanted to employ a spell in the context

of a battle had to turn elsewhere, as these spells were of little use for restoring lost hit points in the midst of combat. Unless you had access to potions of healing, fights were deadly.

The Cleric EvolvesIn AD&D, the cleric received perhaps the greatest leap in power compared to other classes. A 1st-level cleric not only received a spell, but a high Wisdom score granted bonus spells. A cleric with a 14 Wisdom or higher started with three 1st-level spells. An 18 Wisdom granted two more 2nd-level spells plus bonus 3rd and 4th-level spells.

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Most important of all, the casting time for cure light wounds dropped from ten minutes to five seg-ments. In other words, a cleric could now (with some risk of losing the spell due to enemy attack) heal his or her comrades in the midst of a fight. In 2nd Edition, the cleric received even more goodies. Spheres allowed a cleric to customize his or her spell list to match the specifics of a deity. For instance, a cleric of a war god would have access to a different list of spells than a cleric of a weather god. Furthermore, 2nd Edition’s Player’s Handbook saw the incorporation of more attack spells for clerics; spells that allowed a cleric to hurl attacks at a foe had shown up in AD&D supplements before 2nd Edition, but now they were a core part of the game.

3rd Edition toned down spheres, replacing them with a set of domains that provided a limited expan-sion to the cleric’s spell list as well as a special ability. 4th Edition deemphasized the concept of a cleric defined by their deity (although Heroes of the Fallen Lands brought this back); however, it introduced the concept of allowing the cleric to heal and attack during the same turn. Healing word in 4th Edition requires a minor action, allowing a cleric to blast a foe and heal a comrade at the same time. As you can see, the general trend follows two basic paths:

•Healing magic became easier to use, transitioning from something cast outside of combat, to an option in a fight, to a rider placed on top of attacks or used in addition to an attack.

•Clerics gained more spells, presumably allowing them to carry more healing into the dungeon.

•Clerics moved away from pure support in their magic, gaining access to attack spells or special abil-ities derived from their chosen deities.

Some of these additions link to the concepts of increased options and customization. Fighters, for example, gained weapon specialization in 2nd Edi-tion, allowing them to create an identity based on a weapon. By the same token, clerics customized them-selves by choosing a deity. However, no other class shows the same jump in options and abilities. Magic-users—from the original D&D game up to 2nd Edition—had the same basic spell progression. Even 3rd Edition, viewed by many as a massive upgrade for spellcasters, gave 1st-level wizards a bonus spell based on Intelligence and a few cantrips. In comparison, clerics in 3rd Edition gained a domain spell, a bonus spell based on Wisdom, and two abilities based on domains.

Clearly, something beyond giving players more options was at work here.

The Cleric: Loved By Millions, Played by Thousands*Realistically, at the end of the day we see that lots of players would rather not play a cleric. The cleric’s primary responsibility is to the rest of the party, to a divine power, and to some holy order. That’s a lot of people to answer to! If you look back throughout the history of the game, time and again you see reluctance to play the cleric. This piece of gaming folklore is taken as a given, but at its heart I think it says a lot about the game, why we play it, and what motivates us to come back to it. All of that, unfortunately, has to wait until next week. . . .

*Guess the movie that provided the inspiration for this quote and receive glory and honor in the comments field!

Legends and Lore: The Problem of Clerics

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The Problem of ClericsLegends & Lore Archive | 5/3/2011

Last week, I talked about the cleric class and how it’s changed over the years. Of all classes, the cleric has gained the most from edition to edition. And yet, the cleric has remained one of the least popular classes. Many players absolutely refuse to play one, yet most groups feel that someone has to be the cleric. Without the cleric’s healing magic, how else is the group going to recover from battles?

Nobody Want to Play Clerics… Except People Who DoAs D&D has moved from edition to edition, clerics probably gained more in order to encourage play-ers to use them. After all, there’s no easier way to motivate players to pick an option than to make that option really, really good. All that power, however, still doesn’t change the fact that—to many people—the cleric’s “ job” is to heal the party. What good are powerful spells and a

crushing mace if you spend round after round saving the fighter and rogue from death? It’s more fun to bash an orc or slay a dragon, rather than play the guy who kept the paladin alive long enough for him to defeat the monster. 4th Edition approached this problem by making healing something a cleric does in addition to cast-ing a spell or attacking a monster. However, that still puts restrictions on a cleric’s tactics and options. For instance, a cleric has to keep close to an injured char-acter and avoid taking too many risks, lest the party lose its access to healing. This design approach begs the question of whether anyone even wants to play the cleric. The truth is that there are people who enjoy play-ing a support role. They don’t need a class that’s more powerful than normal or other trinkets to convince them to give that class a try. They’re happy to serve as the supporting element, content in knowing that the group’s success is what’s important, not any specific individual’s. The perception (and frankly, the reality), however, is that someone has to play the healer. If your group happens to have someone who likes a support role, then you have a cleric. Otherwise, you’re stuck either bending the game to account for the lack of healing or forcing a player into a role they don’t want. 4th Edition took another route, by creating more classes with easy access to healing. The bard, shaman, rune priest, and others can match a cleric in healing, or at least come close enough that the party doesn’t feel too threatened.

Why Do We Need Healing?The cleric issue is, in my opinion, an example of attacking a symptom rather than a root cause. The party needs healing, only the cleric can provide it, therefore someone must play a character they might otherwise prefer to avoid. The simplest, though

perhaps most difficult, solution is to make healing no longer mandatory. Such a change would require a substantial exami-nation of almost every facet of the game. Something like 4E’s second wind starts to point in a direction you could go, but you’d also have to look at monster damage, character attacks and spells, and the struc-ture of a typical adventure. On top of that, you still have to figure out how healing fits into the game. There are people who like playing the cleric, and simply removing the class or its healing would anger the very players the class made happy. The key to this change lies in making healing optional, so that players can embrace whatever role or class they like best. You want groups without any cleric-leaning players to be happy, and you want people who love the concept behind the cleric to still have an option they enjoy. Oddly enough, one way to make healing optional might lie in figuring out how other classes account for it. For instance, you could imagine a world where a party without healing might kill monsters faster and thus take less damage. The opposite could also be true, where a party that replaces a healer with a fighter might be more durable, have better defenses, and thus could survive for a longer period of time.

Legends and Lore: Death and Dying in D&D

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This approach can yield some interesting divi-dends, but it also ignores one of the biggest benefits of healing. Healing is one of the best ways to deal with bad luck. If the DM lands a few crits in a row, or the rogue blows a skill checks and falls victim to a trap, a heal spell is a magic bad luck-eraser. It takes those bad breaks and makes their repercussions disappear. The psychology of that safety net is a powerful tool in the game, one that’s difficult to replace with higher defenses or a better offense. Both of those options are vulnerable to the cruel winds of fate that forever guide our d20 rolls. Making healing potions and similar readily avail-able items can mitigate this problem, but this calls into question the point of clerics. Does it feel fun and exciting to be the support guy if you know that the party can just replace you for a few hundred gold pieces? A party without a fighter can’t simply buy their way out of trouble—and while you could argue that the smart cleric also stocks up on potions and then uses his or her spells for attacks, that also f lies in the face of an option for players who want and enjoy a supporting role. Making healing an optional resource is a tricky proposition, one that offers many obvious routes that conceal follow-up problems. However, solving this issue would go a long way toward creating a game where players are free to create the characters they want.

Death and Dying in D&DLegends & Lore Archive | 5/10/2011Having written about clerics these past two weeks, it’s a short leap to write about the terrible fate all those cure light wounds spells try to fend off: death. Character death has been a part of D&D since the beginning. After all, without some sort of risk then the rewards we earn in the game are cheapened and made hollow.

Raise the DeadIn AD&D, the raise dead spell was available to cler-ics of 9th level or higher. To give you an idea of the power of such a character, the cleric’s advancement table only spelled out the first 11 levels—so reaching 9th level was clearly considered quite an accom-plishment. The person being raised had to survive a Resurrection Survival percentage chance, as deter-mined by their Constitution; but, so long as they hadn’t been dead for more days than the cleric raising them had levels, they’d be fine (albeit weakened from the ordeal). 2nd Edition added one more small wrin-kle, the loss of a point of Constitution, to the process. 3rd Edition kept raise dead at the same level, but added more drawbacks to the spell. In AD&D you had to make the Resurrection Survival check to see if the character was able to be raised, and then the character was too weak to act for one day per day spent dead. In 3E, the caster needed a 5,000 gp mate-rial component to cast the spell, while the recipient now lost a level. Arguably, that’s a softer penalty than the permanent loss of a point of Constitution; then again, due to how ability score bonuses worked in 2nd Edition, plenty of characters could lose a point of Constitution without really noticing it. In 4th Edition, raise dead became a ritual that required 500 gp to cast. In addition, the target suf-fered a –1 penalty to most d20 rolls for six encounters of adventuring. It’s interesting to see how death became less of an obstacle in 4th Edition, after 2nd and 3rd raised the penalties for it. That said, it’s important to remember that 2nd, 3rd and 4th Edition extended the levels of expected play, with 2E and 3E plotting advancement to 20th level and 4E to 30th (though, while 2E did extend to higher levels, like 1E it primarily focused on levels 1-12, with most adven-tures topping out at around 7th level).

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I’m Not Dead YetOddly enough, the process of dying remained largely the same in 1st and 3rd Editions. Characters knocked down to –10 hit points died, and characters dropped to 0 or fewer hit points lost 1 point per round until reaching that threshold. In 1st Edition, a character so incapacitated was forced to rest for a week and lost a limb (or suffered some other permanent injury) at –6 hit points or lower. 2nd Edition was far more draconian, with death at 0 hit points (as it worked in Basic D&D), but with the 1st Edition rule available as an option. 4th Edition extended the death threshold to a neg-ative number equal to half the character’s maximum hit points. In addition, rather than lose hit points each round, a character must make a death saving throw. Fail three of those, and the character dies. For an added wrinkle of complexity, 2nd Edition added a rule for instant death when a character took more than a set amount of damage from a single attack. 3rd Edition also preserved this rule. 4th Edi-tion removed it. Thus, aside from 2nd Edition (and frankly, I think most people used the optional rule), death remained fairly constant in D&D until 4th Edition. In 4E, it is now harder to die from damage as opposed to failed death saving throws.

Some ObservationsFirst of all, I have to admit that I was completely sur-prised at all the little changes to death, dying, and raise dead through the years. I knew that Basic D&D killed off characters at 0 hit points, but otherwise I would’ve assumed that the AD&D rule was consis-tent from 1st to 3rd Edition. I also assumed that the loss of Constitution was another 1st to 3rd constant, and I never would’ve guessed that the 2nd Edition default was death at 0 hit points. I’d like to think it’s because I’ve rarely had a character die (except for my elf wizard Dayereth Sunstar; curse you Jim Cirillo!). More likely it’s because it’s easy to let rules that look similar blur into each other over the years. So what is it with death? Why all these little tweaks and changes? I think it boils down to this: Death is really DM dependent. Some DMs like slaughtering characters by the truckload. They dare their players to delve into dungeons, battling through fiendish traps and endless hordes of monsters. Other DMs find losing a character to be an enormous headache, especially if they have plots and plans sur-rounding them. Eoden the Chosen makes a fairly poor champion of Helm if a gnoll stabs him to death outside Baldur’s Gate before he can complete his prophecy. I’ve talked a lot about how D&D players are a diverse bunch, with their own sets of priorities and preferences when it comes to the game. That extends to DMs and game designers, too. Recently, R&D went back and played every version of D&D ever produced. While the changes in the rules were interesting, what caught my attention the most was the adventures. Playing Basic D&D in an adventure that emphasized exploration and strategic thinking was far more enjoyable than using those same rules to fight mon-ster after monster in a dungeon. In comparison, we played a fairly combat intensive 3E adventure and had a blast.

The rules of D&D and the adventures designed for it have a clear effect on how people play and per-ceive the game. Death and dying play a big role in that feel—from a gritty, harsh game of survival, to a story-driven game where the players know that resolving the plot, not living or dying, is the point of the campaign.

Legends and Lore: Stop, Thief!

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Stop, Thief!Legends & Lore Archive | 5/17/2011I have a confession to make. The thief is my favor-ite character class. I realize that it’s been called the rogue since 1989, but as far as I’m concerned the class will always be the thief. Sure, the name rogue encompasses far more concepts; it gets across the basic idiom of the class—but to me, a rogue is still a thief. It’s a little hard for me to write about this class and remain objective, but I think the thief quietly encapsulates everything that makes D&D awesome.

d4 Hit Die + Lousy AC + Unreliable Skills = A Challenge!Back in the days of Basic D&D, the thief was a fairly weak character. Tied with the magic-user for worst hit points, second to the magic-user for worst AC, the thief made up for these shortcomings with a variety of skills. Only a thief could open locks, find traps, or

hide in shadows. Exciting stuff… until you actually learned enough math to figure out how terrible your chances of success were. For instance, a 1st-level thief in Basic D&D had a staggering 10% chance to hide in shadows. If there was a trap in the dungeon, the thief had a 1% chance (yes, that’s 1%, not a typo) of both finding and removing it; this from a 10% chance to find and a 10% chance to remove it. That’s a worse chance than rolling a 17 or 18 on 3d6. Could you imagine how that played out in adven-turers’ guilds across the Known World? Being a thief had less to do with the class’s actual skills and far more to do with the share of treasure it took away from other, more useful classes. It’s easy to point at the thief and laugh—but that’s not what I did back in the early 1980s. I played a thief, and I loved it. Why? That’s easy. Saddled with a variety of at best unreliable skills, the thief forced me to improvise, invent, and interact* with the game in ways the other classes weren’t forced to. A fighter could chop through orcs, the cleric hammered crea-tures with a mace and threw healing spells, while the magic-user unleashed fireballs and magic missiles. So if I wanted to match them as the thief, I had to be clever. If I just sat back and rolled dice, I’d fail. A lot. Instead, I had to approach the game like improvisa-tional theater, my eyes open for any chance to make something interesting happen.

Conan, What is Best in D&D?That brings us back to what I mentioned at the begin-ning of this article, the idea that ye olde style thief represented everything that makes D&D awesome. Now before I go on, let’s keep something in mind. As I’ve brought up in this series repeatedly, gamers are an incredibly varied group. We play D&D for a vari-ety of reasons. Our approach to the game differs from individual and individual, and from group to group. My favorite part of D&D might be your least favorite, and vice versa.

What I like about D&D, and what keeps me coming back to the game after 30 years, is the infi-nite possibilities it opens up to us. There’s something incredible about the group creativity and action that the game fosters, this sense that we can break off in any direction at any time. Is there a troll in the next room? OK, the thief climbs above the doorway, pulls out a f lask of Greek fire, and the rest of the party attracts the monster’s attention. When it comes through the door, troll f lambé! In other types of games, you couldn’t do that unless the designer anticipated it. In an RPG, all it takes is a good idea and a few die rolls. The DM adju-dicates things on the f ly, and the action takes off from there. Maybe the plan goes off perfectly, and the troll bursts into f lame. Or maybe the rogue slips and falls on top of the troll. Even as we shoot off in different directions, we never know what might happen next. It reminds me of the many RPG panels I’ve been on at conventions. Invariably, some beleaguered DM asks what he should do when players ruin his care-fully built plans. A DM can often put together an elaborate plot or sprawling dungeon, only to see the players race off in a completely different direction. To me, that’s D&D in a nutshell. But if you are a DM in

Legends and Lore: Evolution of the Thief

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that position, remember that turnabout is fair play—just as the players can mess up your plans in the wink of an eye, you can do the same to them. When they strike off in a strange direction, roll with it. Pick a few critters from the Monster Manual at random, think about the last good book, movie, to TV show you watched, and go from there. Most entertainment fosters a sense of admira-tion and fandom in us for its creators. D&D fosters a fandom in ourselves. We are the stars, we are the cre-ators. The game gives back to you as much energy and love as you put into it. Not too many forms of enter-tainment can claim that. That’s what makes D&D great. That’s why I still play after all these years.

*This sounds like the logo of a really positive-thinking thieves’ guild, the kind that breaks your money-owing legs with a smile.

Evolution of the ThiefLegends & Lore Archive | 5/24/2011 Last week, I wrote about how the thief (renamed the rogue in 3rd and 4th Editions—and a member of the rogue class group in 2nd along with the bard) was my favorite class. I also talked about how the thief ’s relatively weak abilities back in the day prompted cre-ativity and engagement from players. And of all the classes in the game, I would contend, the thief is the one whose very identity has changed the most over the years.

Sneak Attack!In 3rd Edition, and carried over into 4th, the rogue had the ability to sneak attack. A sneak attack is a damage boost when the rogue has the drop on an enemy or attacks a f lanked enemy. Prior to 3rd Edi-tion, the thief could backstab for bonus damage.

The big change between sneak attack and backstab, aside from the specifics of the damage they inflicted, involved how to activate them. Sneak attack has a set of specific instances when a rogue can use it. If you fulfill any of those conditions, you gain the bonus damage. Gaining sneak attack damage isn’t too difficult (but it can put a rogue at risk); even better, skills like Stealth (or Hide and Move Silently in 3E) offer a fairly good chance of suc-cess if the target has a poor Perception (or Spot and Listen) bonus. Since hiding is one of the many ways you can gain sneak attacks, making that easier made the rogue more potent in a fight. More importantly, it’s clear to a player exactly what he or she needs to do to gain sneak attacks. The rules spell out how to gain combat advantage (or f lanking), and a player simply needs to follow those rules.

BackstabIn comparison, a backstab required a very specific set of circumstances that were left open to a DM’s interpretation. The thief had to attack an enemy from behind while that enemy was unaware of the thief. Typically, a thief would hide in shadows or use move silently to sneak up on an enemy. Once the thief attacked, if his enemy survived he had a hard time pulling off that stunt again. On top of that, the thief ’s f lat percentage chance of success meant that at low levels, relying on those abilities to backstab was dicey at best. Even if you did make the roll, the DM could still easily foil your backstab by looking at the current situation and making a judgment call. DM judgment calls are an important part of the game, but one of the big challenges facing an RPG designer is figuring out where such calls end, and hard and fast rules begin. In the thief ’s case, the class’s most interesting attack ability fell almost entirely to the DM. Having played with DMs who were liberal with backstabs, and those who

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essentially outlawed the ability by fiat, made for much different games. While the rogue kept the thief ’s abilities with skills, the switch from backstab to sneak attack did much to change the perception of the class. In AD&D, the thief usually focused on tasks outside of combat, like scouting, finding and disarming traps, and so forth. 3rd and 4th Editions gave rogues a reli-able combat ability that allows them to do a lot more damage than other weapon-using characters on a consistent basis.

Skills for EveryoneOn top of these changes, the skill system introduced in 3rd Edition and carried over in a modified form to 4th gave everyone access to the rogue’s once unique abilities. A character with a high Strength could climb as well as, or even better than, a rogue. A cleric with a high Wisdom might be better at spotting traps. The class’s unique mechanics had been shifted to the general system, making them something everyone could play with. In some ways, the basic essence of the class had changed. The thief had shifted from a class that offered a set of unique skills and abilities, to one that excelled at dishing out lots of damage. Sneak attack, rather than its skills, became the class’s defining trait.

Balance of OpportunityOne of the things 4E did was balance each of the classes by their role in combat. While I think balance extends beyond combat, combat is a good place to start—after all, during a fight each player gets a turn to do stuff. So what better way to share the spotlight than allow it to move from character to character in a fight? It’s that design principle that has morphed the thief from the guy who got to use a skill system into the rogue with sneak attack.

By the same token, granting all classes access to skill-like abilities helps make the game more flexible and interesting outside of combat. It’s easier to impro-vise actions if you know that your wizard can climb a wall or that your fighter has a chance, however slight, to deliver a stirring speech. The system gives you opportunities to improvise, rather than pushing you to rely solely on the DM’s judgment. The DM’s calls still play a big role, and a good DM encourages creative play, but players now have a starting point in the skill system. Just as balancing options and power in combat gives everyone the chance to shine in a fight, so too does opening up non-combat options to everyone make all areas of the game more f lexible. The thief may have changed into the rogue, but in some ways every character now has the chance to play like a thief.

In an ideal world, the challenge of D&D comes from the DM and whatever daunting situations he or she throws at the characters. The rules should be tools, well-wrought and easy to use, that help build those situations. In the hands of players, such tools are options, ideas, and possibilities that come to life in play—guideposts to help make D&D as funny, scary, and enjoyable as possible. The rules are a springboard to an exciting, engaging, and imaginative game; good ones are neither a straitjacket nor so empty that they suggest nothing. The democratization of options, so to speak, has been one of the most important innovations in D&D across its history. It’s something that helps take the core idea of an RPG—that it’s a game where players are supposed to think outside the lines—and deliver it to every participant. So, the next time you play D&D, remember—skill and ability checks are there to serve as f lexible tools. Take them for a spin and see what happens.

Legends and Lore: Combat and Other Forms of Violence

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Combat and Other Forms of ViolenceLegends & Lore Archive | 5/31/2011I like combat in Dungeons & Dragons. It’s not my favorite part of my game, but it’s definitely fun. Combat has been in the game from the beginning, and you can trace its roots back to the miniatures wargaming hobby of the early 1970s. The fantasy literature that inspired D&D features plenty of battles big and small, and both 1st and 2nd Editions featured rules for large-scale miniatures battles in the world of D&D. While combat has remained constant, it (like almost everything in the game) has changed over the years.

The Early DaysWhen I first picked up Dungeons & Dragons, start-ing with Basic D&D and moving on to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, combat was something we embraced wholeheartedly. Primed by computer games like Wizardry and Bard’s Tale, we loved slug-ging it out with monsters. It wasn’t until our later campaigns that we started to indulge in stories, plots, and exploration. Our first games were monster slug-a-thons, pitting our heroic adventurers against orcs, ogres, and worse. With each foe defeated, we piled up XP and treasure. And I am 100% certain, looking back, that we cheated outrageously. My original gaming group shared DMing duties, so there was an unwritten rule that he who killed a character would suffer the same fate when the vanquished player was DM. This fact makes it a little hard for me to generalize how the

game as a whole worked in this area, but I can make some observations based on my experiences: First, combat was deadly. If you rolled poorly for hit points, then one or two hits knocked you out of the action. However, blessed with the confidence that comes from being young and wholly ignorant of prob-ability, we charged forward into battle nonetheless. As it turned out (thanks to our arrangement), combat was deadly for the orcs and bugbears that we slaugh-tered like so many targets in a first-person shooter. Second, combat was fast. We didn’t use miniatures, so we described a vague set up and started rolling dice. Monsters rarely had lots of abilities, with most just hacking away in melee, round after round. Our battles quickly degenerated into a race to roll double digit numbers on our d20s. Third, we ignored huge swathes of rules. When we played AD&D, we kept using the Basic D&D combat rules. Speed factor, modifiers based on specific weap-ons vs. specific armor, the glorious mess that was the surprise and initiative systems—these we never used. We wanted to fight monsters, and tracking who got to go next or who surprised who was an obstacle to that end. We knew how to attack and cast spells, and that was enough for us. Fourth, we relied a lot on improvisation and plan-ning. Why charge into a room full of orcs when you

could lure them into the oil-soaked hallway that you were ready to turn into a blazing inferno? As it turned out, endlessly rolling dice got boring fast. Doing weird stuff was a good excuse to liven up the game and tilt the odds in our favor. This fourth point is really important, because when you take away the deadliness of AD&D combat you’re left with a fairly boring system. There aren’t too many tactical choices to make, aside from attacking enemies from behind. In our version of D&D, fights became fairly dull. Lacking a skilled DM who could bring a fight to life, and trained by a growing body of video games to expect lots of battles in our game, we grew increasingly bored with D&D. I’m not sure that my experiences are universal, but looking at other RPGs that arose in that time period, we could not have been alone. Most games added more layers of complexity, such as tactical position-ing, hit locations, critical hit tables, and so forth. I believe there was a yearning for more stuff to do in combat, and D&D’s evolution backs that theory up.

Feats, Powers, and OptionsStarting with 2nd Edition’s Player’s Option: Combat & Tactics book and expanded upon in 3rd and 4th Edi-tions, combat in D&D became more tactical. It’s hard to argue that raw complexity increased, as AD&D had its share of arcane rules. Instead, the game added more options, elements, and choices to all areas of a fight. The game’s tactical complexity jumped significantly with the release of 3rd Edition, even as the core rules became clearer and easier to use. Tactical complexity and detail that appeared in games like GURPS, Runequest, and Rolemaster had migrated to D&D. I’ve talked about this transformation in the past in terms of miniatures, but it goes beyond that. Your choices in combat became more important in terms of the system, rather than solely in terms of the DM’s decisions and rulings. 3E introduced formal rules for flanking. The Book of Nine Swords™ and 4E

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included martial maneuvers to give fighters, rangers, and similar characters more choices. Even something as simple as the Power Attack feat from 3rd Edition added a huge array of options to a fighter who previ-ously attacked again and again.

Is This Good for the Game?Some people love tactical complexity. They like options and choices. Others prefer to keep thing simple. If the reaction to the Essentials line has taught me anything, it’s that people like their style of play and don’t want to see it go away. Every edition of D&D has tried to pick a midpoint in its complexity and build from there. The challenge we face is that few people sit exactly at that point, and many place their preferences quite far above and below it. Wouldn’t it be great if D&D supported a

range of complexity, that groups could use to calibrate the game to fit their needs? The time it takes to run a fight is a good illustra-tion of this. The typical D&D fight in the mid-heroic tier takes about an hour or so to resolve. The issue is that it’s difficult to drop the duration of that fight while keeping it a threat. In most cases, the minimum duration is about an hour, and it can easily go up from there. A shorter fight is often a fight that fails to pose any real threat to the characters. Ideally, a DM could adjust an encounter to make it run from a few minutes to several hours, depending on how the group likes to play, while also scaling its threat as desired. If AD&D combat was fast but presented few options, modern D&D combat is slow and presents lots of options. Why not let the continuum rest in the group’s hand, or even in a player’s individual hands? Let some play-ers opt for simple characters, and allow others to build complex ones regardless of class. Let some groups speed through fights to get to the roleplaying or exploration, while other groups focus on tough, complex tactical problems. As a tactical game, D&D has made a lot of leaps forward over the years. The combat rules are clear and support a wide range of fun, interesting choices. The power system in 4E, and feats in 3E, helped give everyone a chance to play on an equal footing. A fighter and a wizard in 4E both have the same capacity to alter the course of a battle. That’s a good thing. Let’s extend that in the other direction, too. I think D&D should also enable groups to focus on tactical combat, or dial down to simple, fast fights. At the end of the day, the gaming group, rather than the rules or a distant game designer, should determine the game’s focus. You can play a D&D campaign set in Kara-Tur, with the characters ral-lying the daimyo’s samurai to throw back a horde of oni. You can play a campaign of courtly intrigue

punctuated with f lashy duels, drawing from the works of Dumas. You might play a campaign based on Indiana Jones, with the characters dodging traps and exploring ancient ruins to claim forgotten trea-sures with the rare, quick fight. All of those games are supported by the imagina-tive structure of D&D. In my ideal world, the DM would create a campaign concept and then tune the rules to match the exact type of game that such a con-cept embraces, from intense tactical combat to quick, sharp duels resolved in a few rolls of the dice.

Legends and Lore: Skills in D&D

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Skills in D&DLegends & Lore Archive | 6/7/2011If you look at RPGs as a whole, skill systems are the foundation of many games. Games like GURPS and Call of Cthulhu rely heavily on skills to give characters their basic abilities. In comparison, D&D came to the skill game relatively late; its relationship with skills over the years has set it apart from other games.

In the BeginningThe 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide included a brief section on player character non-professional skills. Under these rules, the assumption was that characters spend their formative years learning the basic abilities of their class—but might also have a sec-ondary skill, such as forester or gambler, gained while acquiring their class or from earlier years. Characters gained a secondary skill at random, with about a 20% chance of having no such skill at all. In terms of mechanics, a secondary skill served more as a suggestion than a formal rule. It was up to the

DM to determine what a secondary skill actually did in the game. The release of the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide added non-weapon proficiencies to the core game. First introduced in 1985’s Oriental Adventures, non-weapon proficiencies were an optional rule that allowed for more well-rounded characters. They also added options beyond the spread of class abilities and spells, allowing characters to craft goods and weapons, or master swimming, boating or riding. Given the patchwork quality of AD&D’s rules (either a blessing or a curse, depending on your tastes), the non-weapon proficiencies helped fill in gaps. In that era, rules for guiding a boat down a river were likely to show up in whatever adventure happened to need them. From appearance to appearance, they were likely to change based on the needs of the adventure or the author’s knowledge of the prior rule. Non-weapon proficiencies helped change that by bringing structure to the game. If your character wanted to guide a boat down a river, you needed the Boating proficiency. The non-weapon proficiency system made the transition to 2nd Edition, serving as that game’s skill system in the Player’s Handbook.

Ranks and SkillsWhile non-weapon proficiencies branched into areas that other games covered with skills, they had little to do with the mechanics supported by Champi-ons, GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, and other games. D&D maintained a relatively idiosyncratic rule set. That changed with the release of 3rd Edition, which saw the introduction of a system that looked much like those presented in other games. Non-weapon proficiencies were like little on/off switches. If you didn’t have Animal Noise (an example from the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide), you couldn’t try to mimic an owl to lure an orc away from its guard post. 3rd Edition made skills more accessible with its set list, many of them usable even if a character had no

ranks invested in it. A few skills did require training to use, with such design decisions being driven by logic. For instance, a character with no training in magic couldn’t make a Spellcraft check. 4th Edition further refined 3E’s system, trimming the number of skills and simplifying the mechanics for gaining them. 3E’s Jump, Climb, and Swim were all compressed under 4E’s Athletics. Rather than spend ranks, characters were either trained with the skill (for a +5 bonus) or were untrained.

Are Skills Good for the Game?If you’ve been reading my columns, the answer to this question should seem obvious. I wrote earlier in the series about how the core check mechanic, and the option for any class to take any skill, were big

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mechanical improvements in D&D’s history. Rather than having to rely on a specific Boating non-weapon proficiency, a DM can now simply ask for a Strength check to navigate a boat against a current, or a Dexter-ity check to zip around a rock. Even better, skills allow anyone to climb, hide, or pick a pocket. In the early days, only thieves could even attempt such things. On the other hand, skills also create dependence on the rules. If a sphinx asks the party a riddle, can the wizard make an Arcana or History check to figure out the answer? Does that undermine the game for the player who likes puzzling out riddles? Should an interrogation require roleplay, or does someone simply make an Intimidate check? One group’s easy resolution system might short circuit another’s desire for immersion and roleplay. On top of that, the real value of the skill system can change depending on your point of view. Some players see skills as a useful way to customize their characters, picking out things like a 3E Craft skill to

lend mechanical weight to a character’s background. Others prefer to avoid rules for such details, leaving them free to create whatever they want for a charac-ter. Some players like that skills speed up the game, allowing a single check to replace a player’s queries about every object in a room. Others like the immer-sion of working through a room, and the potential rewards this pays to those with an eye for detail. I think that skills are an overall positive addition to the game, as they add a fun element of character customization and form the foundation for a uni-fied task resolution system. However, I do wish that the way we used skills was a bit different. I have two things I’d like to see skills do. First, I’d reward immersive play while allowing players to roll a die rather than narrate an action. I think DMs should respond to a clever idea or a good bit of roleplay with an automatic success in an action. Players who just want to roll could still do that, but smart play would remove luck from the equation.

This approach allows for both immersive play and for a more mechanics-oriented approach. Second, I’d focus skill improvement on special abilities and options rather than a steadily increasing bonus. An increasing bonus puts pressure on the DM to invent ways to make a highly skilled character feel competent. A superior Athletics bonus allows me to scale slippery surfaces, but at the end of the day I’m still just climbing something. That’s the base benefit of the skill. The DM could just as easily make the wall cracked granite rather than smooth glass. If instead characters could unlock special uses for a skill, that becomes a tool for a player to use. For instance, a character highly skilled in Diplomacy might be able to place the mundane equivalent of a charm spell on an NPC. A character highly skilled in Athletics could try otherwise impossible checks, such as attempting to scuttle across a ceiling like a spider. What I like best about that approach is that it allows martial-type characters to gain abilities that can rival magical spells.

Legends and Lore: The Many Faces of D&D

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The Many Faces of D&DLegends & Lore Archive | 6/14/2011If you’ve been reading my columns for any amount of time, you’re probably familiar with a refrain that comes up again and again. D&D caters to a diverse crowd of gamers. Some people like combat, others like roleplaying, and still others like immersion and simu-lation. Over the years, the game has changed to cater to different styles. In many ways, AD&D is a flat-out dif-ferent game compared to 3rd or 4th Editions. Here’s my thesis statement: D&D is at its best when it successfully caters to as many of the styles that its players enjoy as possible. So the question becomes, what are those styles and how can D&D work with them?

First, a DiagramIf you played D&D back in the day, you might remem-ber the old D&D alignment chart. It looked like this:

As you can see, this handy little chart breaks down alignment into its components and shows you where a few common D&D critters sit on the good–evil, law–chaos continuums. I think we can create a similar diagram that shows how people like to play D&D. Using the enormous production budget I have for this column (which is roughly $0), I’ve had the following diagram created:

As you can see, I have a fairly simple chart. There are two axes, one that ranges from tactics on one end and story on the other. The other covers immersion and abstraction. I think those are two good starting points, but I can imagine starting with others. I think of tactics as power gaming: learning to make an efficient character who can take down whatever challenges the DM throws at you by using

the rules to your advantage. The guy in your group who builds optimized characters is on this end of the chart. I think of story as looking for challenges outside of the rules. Coming up with a plan to ambush a bandit gang falls here, as does creating a trade guild, marry-ing into nobility, or building a castle. The guy in your group who likes solving riddles and coming up with a plan straight out of Leverage is on this end of the chart. Immersion translates into seeing the game through your character’s eyes. Rules that feel real, that simulate the reality of the game, and that provide clear, intuitive cause and effect help with immersion. The guy who speaks in character, or who says “That’s what my character would do” (and not as a lame excuse to do something stupid) is at this end of the chart. Abstraction favors functional rather than expres-sive mechanics, those that get the job done without any regard for how those mechanics reflect the real-ity of the game world. Rules like action points are good examples of this sort of design. The guy who re-skins monsters and powers in your game, who uses the mechanics for a shaman but describes his char-acter as a dwarf possessed by a hundred ghosts of his ancestors also fits into this area. When you think about D&D, you can draw a little box on that graph that covers the territory that you find most interesting and appealing. I think most players will sketch out a few boxes, but if pressed they’d pick one as their favorite mode. For example, I

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prefer immersion with an even mix of story and tac-tics. I also like some abstraction, so I’m not at the far end of the immersion end of things. My own location on the chart might look like this:

That isn’t an absolute. For instance, back in 2nd Edi-tion I ran an adventure called The Siege of Kratys Freehold (from Dungeon 33). I loved that adventure, which involved the characters’ organizing defenses against a siege by invading orcs. That adventure was far on the story side of things, since it required the char-acters to come up with imaginative solutions to defeat the orcs. Their spells and magic items played only a small role in the adventure. So, while I think people have generalities, I don’t think they are absolutes. The DM, the group, and the specifics of an adventure can change things. Like alignment, my little chart is a gen-erality that can change in specific situations. I think most people would place themselves squarely in the middle, but I don’t have any hard data to back that up.

What Does it All Mean?Just as you can peg your tastes in D&D to the chart, you can also map the modes that a given version of D&D best supports. 2nd Edition was big on immer-sion and story, with little emphasis on tactics until later in the edition. 3rd Edition emphasized tactics

but it did account for story; its rules also tended more toward immersion than abstraction. 4th Edition has a big focus on tactics and abstraction, while 1st Edition favored abstraction and story. As it happens, each of the four editions of the AD&D branch of the game tends toward one of the corners. None are absolutes, but they each definitely aimed for different things. I think that the ideal D&D would do a good job catering to whatever corner or corners the DM and players like. That sounds fairly obvious. Why not let D&D draw a big box around the entire diagram, rather than stake out one part of it? The answer to that is simple: It’s an incredibly daunting design challenge. As several folks have pointed out in the comments in this series, it’s hard to do one thing well, never mind everything well. In my experience, games that aim for a universal appeal have to pick at least a few assumptions that ground them. GURPS, for instance, assumes that you’re dealing with fairly realistic levels of lethality in combat and character ability. It’s great for a modern espionage game, but for superheroes gaming I’d reach for Champions or Mutants & Masterminds. Can you design a game that could aim for encom-passing all play styles? Is that even a good idea? How can this inform 4th Edition? Next week, I’d like to start tackling those ques-tions. We have to begin at the beginning, the absolute core elements of D&D, and see where that kicks things off.

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The Core of D&DLegends & Lore Archive | 6/21/2011Before I launch into this week’s column, I wanted to pause for a moment and thank everyone who has posted in the comments field of these articles or in various message board threads. It’s great to hear feedback. Positive feedback helps motivate me, and pointing out mistakes or watching discussions bloom helps give me insights into my own thinking and to what’s rattling around in your minds. Specifically about last week’s column, it’s obvious that my names for the axes are fairly bad at getting across their meaning. Clarity is important for this kind of work, so I’ll pay more attention when I start appropriating terms. At the end of the day, though, I

count myself incredibly lucky to have so many people who take the game seriously enough that they’re willing to spend their free time talking about it so passionately on the Internet. Thanks. The bigger insight I’ve gained is that I think there are a lot of different scales you could use on that sort of diagram. As D&D players, we’re diverse enough so that a range which seems important to one person is irrelevant to another, and vice versa. The most useful point to make lies beyond the specific examples, but in the big picture idea that D&D isn’t one game but a range of games. I have a theory that in the days of AD&D, there were a few things at work that helped shape D&D. In the AD&D days, the rules had enough leeway for DM judgment calls that a group could bend and twist the rules to fit the DM’s feel for how things should work. One DM could hand wave details, while another would do a lot of research and incorporate as much realism into the game as possible. Thus, while the design might have pointed in one direction, DMs can and did alter the game as they saw fit. With the release of 3rd Edition, we saw a new trend that 4th Edition only strengthened. The rules became more comprehensive and easier to use. A DM was still free to modify them, but it became a lot easier to just use the rules as written. I think that’s when you started to see divisions among D&D players come to the fore. We always played the game differ-ently, but now that we were a little more reliant on the rules those difference became more obvious. If people play D&D in such a variety of different ways, then what’s left to unite us?

The Essential D&D MechanicsNot too long ago, I decided to send out a short survey to the members of D&D R&D. I asked them to make a list of the most important mechanical elements of D&D. The basic idea was to make a list of mechanics that, if any one of them were missing, you’d feel like

you weren’t playing D&D. From the opposite perspec-tive, these are mechanics that make you think of D&D when you see them in other games. Here’s the list:

•The six ability scores—Strength, Dexterity, Constitu-tion, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma—as the categories for measuring a character’s abilities.

•Armor Class as the basic representation of a charac-ter’s defense.

•Alignment (Law v. Chaos, Good v. Evil) as a per-sonal ethos and a force in the universe.

•Attack rolls made using a d20, with higher rolls better than lower ones.

•Classes as the basic framework for what a character can do.

•Damage rolls to determine how badly a spell or attack hurts you.

•Gold pieces as the standard currency for treasure.•Hit dice or level as the basic measure of a monster’s

power.•Hit points as a measure of your ability to absorb

punishment, with more powerful characters and creatures gaining more of them.

• Levels and experience points as a measure of power and a mechanic that lets characters become more powerful over time.

•Magic items such as +1 swords as a desirable form of treasure.

•Rolling initiative at the start of a battle to determine who acts first.

• Saving throws as a mechanic for evading danger.• “Fire-and-forget” magic, with spellcasters expending

a spell when casting it.

As you can see, it’s a fairly long list. The interesting thing to me is that every edition of D&D supports all of these elements in one form or another. 4th Edition has the most different magic system, but it still features daily powers that function in essentially the same way. If you look at the very original D&D game from 1974,

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you find almost everything listed above in the rules. The only exceptions I can find are some of the combat rules, as the original edition of the game relied on Chainmail. However, even then the only term I could not find in the three rulebooks was initiative. Chain-mail used the basic concept of determining who goes first, but it didn’t use the term initiative. The funny thing to me is that, if you used only these mechanics, you can easily see how you could build an entire game. You don’t need much beyond the implementation of the specific concepts above to make an entire RPG. Games like AD&D and Basic D&D were built in just such a way. Next week, I’ll tackle exactly that question. Does D&D need anything beyond this list?

Playing with the CoreLegends & Lore Archive | 6/28/2011Last week, I talked a bit about the mechanical core of Dungeons & Dragons. These were mechanics that, at least in R&D’s opinion, are uniquely D&D. If you removed them from D&D, you might start to think that you’re playing some other game. If you see them elsewhere, your first thought might be that the game is either based on or borrows from D&D. From the comments, it seems that race is an obvi-ous omission, and alignment is one area that saw a lot of dispute. I won’t argue that many groups ignore or bend alignment, but there’s something to be said for how terms like lawful good and chaotic evil have filtered into the mainstream of gamer and geek con-sciousness. Whether it’s someone trying to peg an alignment to each of the Muppets, or the countless casualties of the “What alignment is Batman?” wars, I think alignment is a part of D&D whether you use it in your games or not. I think race is missing because it was shelved as a story element during the R&D discussion. Clearly though, gaining mechanical adjustment because of your race is a concept that has its roots in D&D. It is also interesting to see how quickly people online make the leap from D&D’s rules to the actions you take during the game. As it so happens, that is precisely what I’d like to talk about this week.

You Are What You DoBefore a session, or in the prep before play, there are a few things everyone does. These are fairly obvious pieces that I think speak to all RPGs. The players create characters, their fictional personas in the game, while the DM prepares an adventure for the session. That adventure might be a largely scripted story, some notes on whatever area the characters are wandering through, or a blank sheet of paper the DM fills with invented details as the game progresses. During play, things get more interesting. The play-ers all assume fictional personas. The important question is what do those fictional personas do? Setting aside mechanics, I think you can boil D&D down to three basic activities: exploration, roleplay, and combat. Personal tastes vary as to which of the three is the most important, but I think most groups dabble in all three. To me, exploration is all about uncovering secrets and thinking in terms of the big picture. It’s the excitement of setting sail on the Nyr Dyv in search of the Isle of Woe. It’s the uncertainty of checking for traps, or trying to figure out which door to open first. Exploration is a strong part of D&D because it plays into the idea that the players can do whatever they want on a large scale. You can strike off into the forest west of town just to see what’s there, or take a long route around an undead-occupied keep to attack it from an unexpected direction. It gives play-ers a real sense of control over their characters and the story—one that few other games can continue to feed for as long as a D&D campaign. When you get to the edge of a map in D&D, the DM just fills in the area beyond.

It’s easy to think about roleplay in terms of portray-ing a character with a funny accent or with a set of distinct mannerisms. That’s part of it, but I also think it links into your character’s ties to the people and

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events in the campaign world. Forging an alliance with a barbarian tribe, seizing control of a thieves’ guild, or marrying into nobility and building a castle are all parts of roleplaying. The strength of roleplay is that you can give two players identical characters, but in play the two can appear vastly different simply based on how they act. It in part occupies the area outside of the rules, the space where a player has free rein to mold a character. Combat is the area where we see the most rules. Most players are happy to let the DM create a world or dungeon to explore, and the DM can make judg-ment calls on relationships and characterization. Combat is the most common point where the play-ers and DM come into conflict, so we expect rules to keep things fair. Obviously, combat is about defeating monsters and NPCs. To a lot of players, exploration and roleplay serve to set up combat. You fight the nec-romancer lord because he threatens to destabilize the fragile alliance you worked so hard to build. You travel to a strange, lost temple and battle the yuan-ti that infest it. Some groups reverse that process. If you defeat the bandit gang, you make an enemy of the thieves’ guild and the nobles in town who are linked to it.

From a design perspective, I think that you need to design a game that accommodates all three activities in an easy, intuitive manner. The rule set should pro-vide at least basic support, with opt-in complexity or expansion in specific directions for groups that prefer one over the other. That concept is the root of the dia-gram I showed off two weeks ago.

What Does This Mean for D&D?If you think of combat, exploration, and roleplay as what you do during the game, then the fundamental mechanics of D&D are how you do those things. The union of those two, combined with the basic format of an RPG (DM, players creating fictional personas), creates D&D. That’s the game in a nutshell. So what does the game look like if you strip every-thing away except for essential mechanics, and then orient them to support exploration, roleplay, and combat? What would D&D look like? We’ll start answering those questions next week.

Minimalist D&DLegends & Lore Archive | 7/5/2011“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Last week, I talked about the basic activities of D&D. These were the basic things that you did during the game with the help of the mechanics or the DM’s adjudication. In looking at your comments, a few people mentioned that problem solving, including puzzles, was its own thing. Others talked about role-playing as an aspect of the entire game, an activity layered on top of everything else you do. Personally, I take something of the opposite view. In my mind, problem solving is an aspect of combat, roleplay, and exploration. If you need to solve a puzzle to open a sealed door, that’s part of exploration. By the same token, I think you can mix roleplay into everything in terms of characterization, but I think there’s a separate bucket for it assuming a role in the DM’s campaign setting. The main use I see for the categories lies in direct-ing story and mechanical development. You could imagine a DM equipped with three dials, one for each of the basic activities described last week. A DM can twist those dials to match a level of complexity, or the direction of the campaign, as needed. If a player wants to become king, you need to con-sider creating mechanics for that (either specific rules or a general set of options that the DM can apply). The main issue I see with puzzles and problem

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solving is that I believe most players don’t want spe-cific mechanics for this sort of challenge. If you like puzzles, you probably like the challenge they pose to your skill as opposed to your character’s skill. In my experience, mechanics applied to puzzles usually make them more palatable to players who don’t like puzzles. So in my mind, that dial is more of an on/off switch for the DM to determine if puzzles show up in the campaign. Of course, your mileage may vary. One of the most enjoyable parts of game design is discovering new methods and approaches. Maybe there’s a middle ground out there that isn’t quite evident yet.

The Mechanical Core of D&D: AbilitiesSpeaking of complexity, this week I’d like to take a look at the six core abilities. They’ve been a part of D&D since the beginning. For a few years we had a seventh ability, Comeliness, to describe a character’s physical attractiveness (as opposed to Charisma’s focus on personality). Dragon magazine also pub-lished rules for another ability, Perception, back in the day (issue #133) . . . but neither of those rules caught on. In the beginning, your abilities gave you a bonus to experience points and that was it. The first sup-plement for the game, Greyhawk, changed that by extending bonuses for high abilities that have per-sisted ever since. Strength granted a bonus to attacks and damage, Dexterity modified AC, and so forth. Very early on, it was clear that Gary Gygax saw that players expected a link between their characters’ abil-ities and their strengths and weaknesses in the game. The basic system laid out in Greyhawk remained unchanged until 3rd Edition, which simplified the bonus progression and clarified the interaction between abilities and some areas of the rules. 4th Edition continued in the 3E vein, using the ability score modifiers in a wide variety of situations. I’m going to make a crazy supposition here: If you go back to 1974 and look at the basic rules of D&D at that time, all of the basic, administrative stuff in the game had been solved via ability scores. Take those, add in 3E’s and 4E’s unified bonus progression, and your entire game engine has its foundation. Lots and lots of stuff that we take for granted—stuff that has been in the game since the beginning—does the same exact work as an ability score. The abilities are sitting on the bench, ready to shoulder the load, but we’ve never asked them to. The underlying reason is simple. Until D&D had its universal task resolution system, the game couldn’t use the abilities in this way.

Abilities Define Your CharacterThere’s a funny disconnect in D&D. Let’s say the bar-tender at the Dancing Boar slips a vial of poison into your drink. Most folks would expect a character to make a saving throw versus poison, a Fortitude save, or suffer an attack against Fortitude defense. Those mechanics all work well, but I think they’re ignoring something really important. You already have a Constitution score. While your Constitution modifier can factor into a save or defense, why bother with that step? Why not just use your Constitution score as a defense and your modi-fier as a saving throw? In terms of story, we see the same results. The tough dwarf unleashes a thunder-ous belch and just keeps drinking. His friend the sickly elf coughs, goes cross-eyed, and falls over. The saving throw mechanic, either labeled according to the incoming attack or the target defense, just seems to step in the way. Our nice, fairly universal mechanic can handle that work, but we instead bring in a spe-cialist sub-contractor to tackle it. In the beginning, ability scores helped you earn extra XP. That’s all they did. Your saving throws were a separate part of your character, determined by class. In fact, almost everything back then was determined by class. Ability score modifiers came shortly after, but by that time saving throws were already in the game. They remained in the game until 4E replaced them with defenses, duplicating the same basic mechanic but just reversing the die roll. What’s interesting to me is that the game f lirted with using abilities. Non-weapon proficiencies used them as a measure of skill, with players trying to roll under the score. 3E and 4E used the modifier as part of the skill system. What if you applied the same thinking to remove the skill system entirely and instead just used an ability check? You use Charisma to intimidate or bluff, rather than a separate but related skill.

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When you look at the abilities in that light, it opens up a lot of possibilities. Entire layers of the game become optional add-ons rather than necessary for basic functionality. Skills sit on top of your abilities. Mechanics that improved your defenses or saving throws become situational benefits to your abili-ties. In terms of simulation, that giant’s 24 Strength speaks for itself when you make an attack against its Strength to push it. The abilities describe any charac-ter or monster in a fairly concise but comprehensive way while creating a relatively small mechanical footprint. Next week, I’ll talk about character classes and the role they serve. I’ll also expand a bit more on this idea of the ability scores as the central starting point for everything.

Head of the ClassLegends & Lore Archive | 7/12/2011Last week I wrote about an approach to the game that focused on a character’s or monster’s ability scores. Many of the sub-systems in D&D serve as a buffer between a game mechanic and these abilities. By stripping away those mechanics and focusing on the abilities, we might find a simpler, more intuitive core to the game. This week, we turn our attention to the character classes.

You Are What You DoIn the early days of D&D, your character class provided the staggering majority of your character’s capabilities. Your class provided your armor and weapon options, hit points, saving throws, and attack values. In the beginning, classes were relatively simple. As I’ve written about earlier in this series, D&D has shown a strong tendency to gain complexity and detail with each passing edition. When it comes to classes, that complexity usually arises from a growth in options. Fighters started with few class features, and gained weapon specialization, feats, and then powers. Clerics gained spell lists that changed based on their deities, while their turn undead expanded to become a general ability to channel divine energy for various functions. By 3rd Edition, all characters gained skills and feats which provided a new, f lexible way to determine what your character could do. Class was still the most important thing, but it wasn’t the only thing. In many ways, you could argue that character class is the major engine of change between edi-tions of D&D. The early editions had simpler classes,

while 3E added more layers of customization. 4th Edition, at least out of the gate, gave the classes an identical power progression to create a unified play experience. While 3E did remodel the core D&D mechanics, those changes were mostly carried over to 4E. By the same token, 2E focused on clarifying and streamlining rules. THAC0 is a simpler way to express the basics of the AD&D combat tables. The major mechanical changes were tied to the character classes by adding options to some or incorporat-ing non-weapon proficiencies and later kits for all characters. With the game becoming steadily more complex, at least in terms of choices and options, how do you manage the disparity between players who like lots of choice and those who are happy with a few basic deci-sions? Traditionally, D&D has solved this by making the fighter simple and classes like the druid or cleric complex. However, that solution needlessly slices the pie based on what you want to do, rather than how you want to do it. RPGs offer unmatched freedom to explore a world, battle monsters, and carve a place in a setting. If f lexibility and adaptability are two of

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their selling points, why not extend that to character creation? Why not allow for a simple fighter and a complex fighter, or the same range for any class?

The Core ClassImagine a world where the first-time D&D player rolls stats, picks a race, picks a class, picks an align-ment, and buys gear to create a character. Imagine if an experienced player, maybe the person helping our theoretical player learn the ropes, could also make a character by rolling ability scores and picking a race, class, feat, skills, class features, spells or powers, and so on. Those two players used different paths to build characters, but the system design allows them to play at the same table. This setup would allow a new player to dive into the game quickly. A veteran player who wants options could customize a character. For a quick game, or for a player who doesn’t really care about customization, the simpler route provides a welcome option. Such a setup is fairly easy to implement from a design point of view. Let’s take a look at the fighter in this world. The simple fighter—let’s call it the core fighter—has a progression that provides attack and damage bonuses that allow the fighter to operate as a skilled warrior in combat. Other automatic options could duplicate skills and non-combat abilities. In terms of the math and options for combat, exploration, and roleplay, the fighter is right on target for the skill and power we expect from a character at each level. The core fighter presents an advancement chart that looks a lot like the one from the early days of D&D. It tells you what you get, and your only real choices lie in equipment. Now let’s imagine that in a separate section of the rules—perhaps right after the core fighter or maybe in a chapter giving advanced character options—we learn that the core fighter is just a fighter with all of the choices made for it. Where the core fighter has class features, the advanced fighter has choice

points such as feats and class feature menus. The core fighter simply has a set of pre-selected benefits. With that change, we’ve given a simple and cus-tomizable option for every class. Even better, within the advanced option we can give lots of different types of choices. If you like making tactical choices, perhaps some of the feats or class features give you encounter, daily, or at-will powers. Other features give you benefits that improve all of your attacks in a manner similar to feats like Cleave or Power Attack. From a game balance standpoint, we can ana-lyze each option and compare them in terms of raw power. By breaking down the math behind the game, we can judge the relative value of a power you can use once per day and a feat that gives you a bonus to all of your attacks. Why would you set up the game this way? Beyond the benefit of allowing players to pick their level of customization, you also gain a number of other advantages. Creating a character for a pick-up game is easy, since players can just use the core classes to save time. New players have an entry ramp that is directly integrated into the system. DMs who want to create NPCs or monsters with class levels can use the core class to speed up the process. In some ways, you might argue that you could play a game similar to any edition of D&D simply by opting into different levels of complexity. You could even collapse race down into the core options: The dwarf could be expressed as a

core class, a fighter progression that focuses on dura-bility, defense, and expertise with an axe or hammer. The core elf uses the multiclass rules to combine fighter and wizard, and the core half ling uses a preset rogue advancement chart. Choosing race could be part of the advanced rules, making setup even faster for new players or players who don’t want to spend a lot of time customizing their characters. At the end of the day, you’d have a game that can appeal to a variety of play styles and levels of experi-ence, all while keeping the focus on a single set of modular rules.

Legends and Lore: The Rules

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The RulesLegends & Lore Archive | 7/19/2011“The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don’t need any rules.”

–Gary Gygax

“Rule 0: The unwritten rule in tabletop role-playing games (such as Dungeons & Dragons) which grants the game master the right to suspend or override the published game rules whenever s/he deems necessary.”

–urbandictionary.com

So far in this series, I’ve spent a lot of time talk-ing about character classes and other issues from the player’s point of view. That presents only half of the story of D&D. This week, it’s time to take a turn behind the screen and think about the DM’s perspective.

In some ways, the entire concept of RPG mechanics makes little sense when you consider that the DM is on hand to adjudicate things. Rules can’t turn a bad DM into a good one or ensure a “fair” (whatever that might mean) game. In my view, rules that try to force the DM to play fair are a waste of time. After all, the

DM can just put Tiamat in the next room of the dun-geon and slaughter the characters whenever he or she wishes. Why try to legislate some of the DM’s power while leaving huge, gaping holes elsewhere? Is the book going to suddenly animate and pummel the DM for being a meanie? On top of that, isn’t the entire point of the DM to serve as a referee and rules arbiter? If you feel the need to mechanically restrict the DM, you might as well make a board game and assume that the DM is one player fighting all the others in a competitive game. The truth is that D&D is not fundamentally a com-petitive game of DM versus the players. If it were, it would be hard to imagine a situation where the DM doesn’t win unless they restrict themselves in some way. In that case, then, it seems reasonable to ask a simple question. If the DM can just make decisions about how things work, why even have rules in the first place?

The Role of the RulesImagine playing a game of Monopoly when one player decides to take a left at Park Place and drive away in search of a city where there aren’t three other would-be real estate moguls inflating prices. The next player is sent to jail, but where she recruits the racecar to crash through the prison gate to help her escape; she then goes on the run with her stash of money and becomes an international super-criminal. As D&D players, you can see the comparison: RPGs let you do all sorts of crazy stuff. In other games, the rules are guidelines that tell you what you can and cannot do. You can’t break out of jail in Monopoly unless you have the right card to play. In D&D, the DM tells you what you can and cannot do. The rules instead tell you how to do things. This is a subtle point, but an important one. In many ways, D&D’s rules are more like the rules for a sport than a game. Consider soccer. (Editor’s note: As many of us do; congratulations to Japan on their World

Cup victory.) There are rules for how you can attack the goal, limiting player movement by ruling some players who advance too far forward to be offside. To score a goal, you need to kick the ball into the net. The rules tell you how to score, but they don’t explain what you must do to score. You might head the ball in off a corner kick, or curl in a shot from a distance. The rules give you guidelines on how you can interact with the ball (no hands, unless you’re a keeper or are throwing an out-of-bounds ball back into play) and how you can position yourself on the field—but what you do within those bounds is up to you. D&D is similar in that the rules tell you how to attack, but they don’t tell you what you must attack with. You can throw a punch, swing an axe, or hurl a chair. If you try something weird, the DM uses those rules to determine how to resolve the action. With that in mind—and keeping the idea of com-plexity dials I’ve talked about earlier in this series—I think we have a picture of how the rules of the game apply to the DM. In D&D, the rules serve two purposes. Some rules give formal definitions on how to do things. These are things that are important enough that the players and the DM need to have a clear, mutual understand-ing of how they work. For instance, imagine a world where the DM asks for a Strength check. The DM has to assume that you have a Strength ability and know what it means. The statement also assumes that you know how to make a check and what to do with the result of that check. These are the kinds of rules that breed understanding and clarity during the game. If you think back to soccer, the rules tell you how you can touch the ball. If a midfielder picked the ball up and threw it into the net, everyone watching knows that’s a penalty. (Editor’s note: At least, most of the time.) The second type of rule is a meta-rule, which allows a DM to adjudicate situations that fall out-side of the proscribed mechanics. A check is a great example of this. If a character wants to hold a sagging

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roof up over her head while an injured dwarf crawls to safety, the DM can pick a DC and call for a Consti-tution check to see if the character can maintain that position for long enough. The DM understands how checks work, how DCs function, and what ability is appropriate in that situation. The rules never explic-itly tell the DM how to handle the situation, but it’s easy to infer a good method from the definitions of those things. Sports don’t have rules like this. Since they’re competitive, the game would grind to a halt if some-thing happened outside of the rules. The referee

could make a decision, but in an official match there would likely be protests filed, complaints, and maybe even lawsuits. In pro sports there have been several examples of games that have been replayed in part or in whole at a later date to correct some strange rule irregularity.

The Rules’ FocusWith that in mind, I think you could approach the game from a slightly new perspective, one that other RPGs have used to varying degrees. Just as a player might be able to opt into complexity by choosing a core fighter or opting into different layers of options, a DM could either create a specific type of campaign or opt into complexity by adding more elements to the body of proscribed, descriptive rules. The core rules could consist of the basic func-tionality of combat, roleplay, and exploration. Ability checks with a d20 measured against a DC serve as the basic rule. For combat, the rules cold feature a fairly simple, miniatures-less system. The roleplay rules are really just guidelines for improvising, ideas for creating NPCs and organizations, and advice on using Charisma checks. The exploration rules explain how to incorporate wandering monsters, searching, and survival. Just as a player adds in extra complexity, the DM might decide to incorporate additional rule systems to focus the campaign or to hit a preferred level of options and complexity. A political game would then include rules for managing fiefdoms, negotiations, and alliances; those rules might even allow NPCs to trick or exert control over the PCs. In most cam-paigns, the players would rebel against losing control of their characters, but in a game where a fight is a political struggle or a test of wills that might take the place of combat. For a campaign that instead focuses on tactical battles, advanced rules and options would allow for detailed miniatures play and added layers of tactical

complexity such as facing, an action system where characters spend a budget of points to take actions, and so on. That complexity for a sword fight might bore the political-minded group, but it excites the gamers who want detailed, intense battles. In some cases, these rules could also add to a char-acter sheet or open up a new set of options for the characters. The key is that by opting into a set of rules, the DM indicates that such an area is a key to the campaign. Of course, a DM could always just rely on the core rules and improvise or imagine the outcomes. In this manner, the DM tailors the campaign not only to what he or she wants but also to how the group will approach those goals. Like a sport, D&D has a basic set of rules that serve as a common starting point. Unlike a sport, each campaign might need more or fewer of such rules depending on the tastes of the DM and play-ers. Under this model for D&D, the rules give us a common starting point on which we can then layer the specific differences we want to embrace as a group or within the bounds of a campaign.

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Setting the BarLegends & Lore Archive | 7/26/2011Over the past few weeks, I’ve talked about an approach to D&D that focuses on modularity. Play-ers and DMs can choose to opt into complexity, either in terms of options or specific rules sub-systems added to the game. A DM might use a detailed, tac-tical combat system for a combat-heavy campaign. One player can optimize his or her fighter by making lots of feat and class feature choices, while another can choose a core character with all of those choices predetermined. All of those options might sound nice, but there’s one key question that remains unanswered. With all of these dials, switches, and knobs—how do you make sure that the game still functions correctly? It stands to reason that giving characters lots of new options and abilities makes them more powerful. On the other hand, how do you make sure that the basic idea of D&D means something important without splintering it into dozens of factions, each using different rules?

Game Balance through Superior FirepowerLet’s first tackle the concept of balance and how it interacts with scaling complexity. Of course, that spawns a big question: What does R&D mean by balance? To R&D, balance means two things: For the player, it means that characters of the same level are all at roughly the same level of ability regardless of class or race. There might be overlap, in that a fighter and barbarian are both good at fighting with weapons. There might also be divergence. The fighter has more hit points than a rogue, but a rogue can sneak up on monsters, disarm traps, and slip away from an enemy unharmed. The fighter might outshine the rogue in some situations, and vice versa,

but overall the two classes feel like they can both con-tribute to an adventure. For the DM, balance means that the DM can make a good estimate on the difficulty of a mon-ster, trap, or other obstacle. The system lets the DM compare the characters to a green dragon and get a good sense of whether the dragon is a deadly fight, a fight that might beat up the characters but not kill them, or a pushover. The DM can still throw what-ever she wants at the characters, whether she plans things out with a painstaking attention to detail or just rolls on a random encounter table. However, the rules give her a benchmark to compare characters to obstacles. With that in mind, the easy answer to the bal-ance question would be to focus everything on one scale, with character power defined as a set value

based on a character’s level. In other words, char-acters power never changes because of the rules modules you use. To be blunt, this is kind of a lame solution. It puts players on a treadmill, giving them lots more choices without any payoff beyond cosmetic customization. It also works against the idea of allowing a DM to f lavor a campaign based on the characters’ power. Finally, the issue of cosmetic changes works both ways. A group that is happy with streamlined char-acters but that wants some power neutral options to f lesh them out is stuck using the same rules module as a group that wants to focus on optimization and combat ability. Instead, let’s imagine a world that works like this. The core classes—and let’s continue to use the fighter as an example—look a lot like the classes from Basic D&D or AD&D. Our fighter’s attacks improve in accuracy, he gains more attacks, and his hit points steadily increase. That’s the basics of a D&D fighter. Now, let’s imagine that a group wants more tacti-cal options for the fighter. They want to incorporate 4E-style maneuvers. With the addition of that sub-system, the fighter becomes more powerful. If the group wants to keep the power level bal-anced between classes, each other class also gains access to a rules module that makes it more powerful (wizards might get more spells, clerics gain access to domain abilities, rogues could get maneuvers like fighters or a trick or stunt system). The DM might pick out systems to add, or she might tell each player to choose a favorite optional rule for their characters. The characters have all gained, in the abstract, a simi-lar amount of power. Let’s arbitrarily call that one unit of power. In response, the DM simply dials up the cam-paign’s difficulty by using tougher monsters or greater numbers of enemies. In broad terms, the DM treats the party as if it was more powerful than

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normal. In 4E terms, the DM has a bigger XP budget to create adventures. In 3E terms, the encounter level increases. If the DM wants to keep the advancement rate the same, she simply requires the characters to gain more XP to gain a level.

From a design standpoint, each optional rule needs to be balanced against the other optional rules. If you wanted to get fancy, you could extend the difficulty setting to account for adding multiple options. That could also allow you to stack the same option mul-tiple times. For instance, a fighter could gain access to action points and maneuvers, or the DM could use the feat rules but allow the characters to take double the number of feats. In either case, the characters received a two power unit upgrade. If that isn’t fancy enough for you, some options might be two or three times better than our baseline ones. The gestalt character rules from 3E’s Unearthed Arcana™ might be worth three times power units. With this approach, a DM could create a cam-paign with a very different feel or one that focuses on the specifics of what the players want. If you wanted to go the opposite direction, making the baseline characters even weaker for a grittier game, you could extend the XP guidelines downward and decrease the characters’ power level. Keep in mind that these alterations focus on character power in combat. In terms of roleplaying, exploration, puzzles, and other activities, the DM has much freer rein to devise obstacles. Of course, a formal system of social combat could also provide XP tables that would then shift if the DM added optional rules to make the characters better at that form of conflict. Other optional rules would be XP neutral. Going back to our core fighter, if he gains a castle and fol-lowers at high levels that might not affect the class’s combat abilities. When a DM adds those rules to the game, they have no impact on the XP charts. Follow-ers and men-at-arms might need to remain at the

fighter’s keep to run things. Taking them on an adven-ture might lead to a peasant revolt or treachery back home. On the other hand, you could take the oppo-site approach and balance them at a power unit cost. Perhaps the rules module includes both options to let DMs decide how a title and land ownership interact with adventuring.

On top of all this, a DM who isn’t worried about balance between characters and monsters could just wing it. A high-level fighter with a keep could take his retainers on an adventure, and the DM just rolls with it. The penalty of losing men-at-arms and followers in combat is enough, and if the adventure is easier that’s just part of the game.

Away From the CampaignIf a DM could then sculpt a campaign with a good understanding of the characters’ relative power, what does that mean for how different groups interact?

First, we’d need clear names for any new sub-systems. You’d want to tell a new player that you’re using feats and skills for all characters, martial maneuvers for fighters and rogues, domains for clerics, and school specialization for wizards, or whatever your specific mixture of options looks like. Second, from a design perspective there would be two types of modules. Some modules are gener-ally useful across all campaign types. Feats, skills, or personality traits are new options to layer on top of a character, areas that grant increased customization and/or power. R&D would need to keep a close watch on those modules to stop them from proliferating. On top of that, each module would need a clear identity. If a DM says she’s using a module, the player should have a really good idea of what that means about the campaign. The other type of modules serve to create a unique type of campaign. For instance, rules for sailing ships and commanding a crew are useful for a pirate cam-paign. They might even include a new type of ability that all characters can choose from. However, that rules module has a clear utility for a specific type of campaign; there’s an obvious use for a game inspired by The Odyssey or pirate movies. In contrast, a Dark Sun® campaign or one that focuses on dungeon crawls doesn’t need such detailed rules. The basic, core rules for ships and water travel are enough. With this approach, rules modules serve to help a DM define a campaign. Some of the options apply to the core, but others are tools to customize a game and create a unique setting. Ideally, using these options is no different for a DM than explaining to a player that her campaign is set in renaissance Italy combined with air ships, dragon overlords, and magic.

Legends and Lore: Modular Madness

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By tying options to how they affect character power, and using that increase as a tool for DMs, we can create a menu of options that allow a DM to sculpt the rules to match a campaign. If those options are conceived, designed, and presented correctly, they become useful identifiers that DMs and players can use to describe their preferences and campaigns.

Modular MadnessLegends & Lore Archive | 8/2/2011One of the primary goals I had in mind in kicking off this article series was to start a conversation between gamers and R&D. I’ve mentioned this before, and I’ll mention it again that your feedback in the forums and elsewhere is vitally important to keeping D&D healthy and interesting. With that in mind, I’d like to revisit a few of the concepts I touched on last week.

The FoundationOne of the things I mentioned last week was the idea that skills and feats could be optional systems. In read-ing through the feedback, it’s clear that most people desire a starting point that includes those elements. Character customization is a big part of D&D. It makes sense to avoid putting too much of that into the classes. Otherwise, they lose some of their iconic identity. On the other hand, feats and skills are really handy for customizing a character. Since they’re shared between classes, you can design them to archetypes or concepts that can move between classes. It also suggests that feats and skills shouldn’t be linked to the core math of the game. If classes carry the combat, interaction, and exploration abilities that the game expects from the typical character, feats and skills allow you to specialize in one of those areas. In other words, your feats allow you to be better at something than other characters. That difference should be noticeable, but it can’t be so big that it dis-rupts balance. If we make feats and skills part of the core, we can then create a fairly simple rules module for old school D&D play. These rules not only would remove

feats and skills, but they would also explicitly push the game toward DM rulings rather than hard and fast rules. This sort of rules module would use the same DM guidelines for adventure design. The idea would be that player skill—knowing where to look for traps, learning a monster’s weaknesses, making smart strategic decisions—takes the place of the mechanical advantages offered by skills and feats. In some ways, it’s like playing D&D in hard mode.

The ModulesThe idea of an old school rules module paints a pretty good picture of how the module concept could work. I think the concept works best if the rules alterations that significantly affect character abilities come in

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bundles that point to a thematic style of play. This approach makes it easy for a DM to explain a cam-paign and gives clear expectations for players. Dark Sun provides a good example of this. You could imagine that the Dark Sun rules module offers the following for all characters:

• Superior ability scores created either by a generous random method or a point buy option with a bigger budget;

•Psionic talents for all characters;•Racial variants with greater ability score bonuses.

These modifiers are pure additions without draw-backs. They make characters more powerful because that’s how Dark Sun works. On the DM’s side of the screen, the adventure and encounter building guide-lines account for this increase in power. In addition, the rules for non-metal weapons and the rarity of magic items also help to balance the campaign. Other modules would require a similar thematic approach, one that helps snap everything into focus. For the advanced DM, it wouldn’t be hard to take the next step and assign a power level to each indi-vidual enhancement. Such DMs could then mix and match rules to create unique campaigns or match the mechanics to fit the worlds they’ve built.

ComplexityI’ve talked a fair bit about complexity, and it’s worth revisiting it again. If you make feats and skills part of the core game, then you solve some issues with complexity and character creation. The core class concept—class pro-gressions with choices predetermined across each level—works well here for pick-up games, new players, or quick NPC creation. Additional rules modules could use a similar approach. Dark Sun psionics might be wild talents gained by rolling on a table, or the power list could

include a few simple, easy packages that beginners could select and use, DMs can layer on top of NPCs to save time, or players could choose when putting together characters for a pick-up game. Other rules modules might add complexity in layers. The realm management rules could have a basic version that resolves military conflicts, handles the general happiness and loyalty of the realm, and determines revenue through taxes. More detailed sub-systems could exist for each of those options, allowing DMs to tailor the focus of the campaign as needed. You could also imagine those rules coming into play as nec-essary. When the paladin gains the throne, she might have a trusted general on hand to manage the threat posed by the barbarian tribes. Later in the campaign, as the tribes prepare to go to war against the realm, the trusted general betrays the paladin. The paladin must now personally manage the armies, thus allowing the DM to segue into the more detailed system.

A Work in ProgressIn some ways, you can think of this process as akin to character creation for the DM. The DM decides what kind of campaign he wants to run, in terms of tone, world elements and so forth, and then picks out options or rules modules that match that tone. The campaign setting becomes as much of a character in the rules as any NPC, location, or event.

Skills in D&DLegends & Lore Archive | 8/9/2011As I’ve been working on this series of columns, it’s been interesting to read your reactions here and on the forums. A number of times I’ve seen people point out that it would be nice to see some actual design. I have a confession to make: I’m no longer a game designer at Wiz-ards of the Coast. In my new role, I’m a manager. I guide the teams, but I don’t do the actual design work. So what you’re about to see is work done by a guy who’s a little out of prac-tice. I’m going to show you some of our previously discussed concepts on (virtual) paper. They might be terrible, they might be great. Most likely, they’ll be somewhere in the middle. What I hope to get, though, is a sense of any value these ideas might have. By now, Gen Con has come and gone and you’ve heard that we’re releasing a new D&D skirmish game for next year. Hopefully, you’ve also heard that we’re doing an open play test for the game. This is our chance to make sure that the rules are as clear as pos-sible and that we deliver on a great game. Earlier this year, we launched a set of weekly columns (including this one) to reach out to the D&D player community and to give you all a greater voice. Our approach to the skirmish game mirrors that goal, and it will be an important consideration going forward with new D&D games. When we can manage an open playtest, we will do so. If we can’t do an open test, we owe it to you to conduct closed playtests that are as large as possible.

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With that in mind, here’s a piece of actual design (OK, that’s being generous) that sketches out some of my thoughts on skills in D&D.

Goals of a Skill SystemWhen we talk about complexity in D&D, it’s easy to focus on aspects of the game that feature intricate, detailed rules. I think that’s part of the story, but there’s also something to be said for the complexity of having lots of simple rules. At some point, you have to look at the situation not just in terms of how the rules work but how the players manage the rules at the table. A game with lots of rules may require more lookups during play or have conflicts between rules. They might also create the sense that the rules, not the DM, are in charge of the game. That’s an important point, and one that I think varies from table to table. The skill system is a great example of this. Its core mechanic is the core mechanics of 3rd and 4th Edi-tions: roll a die, add modifiers, and meet or beat a target number. However, embedded within each skill are a number of exceptions and specific rules. Skills describe how to jump, climb, and swim. They interact with determining surprise. They also interact with abilities in odd ways. Some actions fall under skills (lying to a guard), and others are always ability checks (bashing down a door, though in 4E you can extend Athletics to cover that). In both cases, though, you can make an argument that Charisma and Strength carry that weight. Here’s what I propose as a starting point: A skill gives you something new to do or it makes you better at something you already can do. In other words, if you removed the skill chapter from the rulebook, the game would still be playable. You’d be missing options, but the basic functions of the game remain intact. We don’t hide things like the rules for climb-ing or jumping in the skills chapter. We just have rules for how to climb, and then perhaps a skill that makes you better at climbing.

For a lot of other stuff, we can shelve the basic rules for how to do things under the ability scores. For example, Charisma describes guidelines for using that ability to lie, gather information, negotiate a treaty, and so forth. It takes a general approach that sets the scope for the ability. I think a skill system in D&D can either serve as a set of rules for how to do stuff, or it can serve as a way to customize your character. You can do both in the system, but I think that needlessly hides stuff

away from the players. It’s clearer to just create a f lexible, core mechanic, set out the basics of how to do common actions that you expect anyone to be able to do, give the DM a robust mechanic to improvise or make a ruling, and then focus skills on customization. Here’s an example that tackles climbing in D&D. Under this system, we have general rules for climb-ing, probably either in the combat or exploration chapter. The general rules for climbing appear first.

CLIMBWhen you climb, you must be standing up and have both hands free. Your Strength score determines your climb speed. Some creatures, such as spiders, climb faster than normal.

You can climb a vertical surface, but cannot climb across a ceiling or similar surface without a special ability.

When you are climbing, all attacks against you gain combat advantage. If you cannot take standard actions while climbing, you immediately fall. You also fall if any effect forces you to move against your will or if you are knocked prone.

Ability Checks and Climbing: If the surface you want to climb is a covered with handholds or is easy to scale—such as a length of rope, a rocky cliff face, or a wall pockmarked with holes and cracks— you simply climb it at your climb speed.

In some cases, you might need to climb a treacherous surface. If you try to climb a rope covered in grease, a crumbling rock wall, or a statue as a hill giant rocks it back and forth, you risk falling to the ground. When you attempt to climb, the DM may ask you to make an ability check to see if you can complete the climb. If your check fails, you make no progress on your climb. If your die roll is a natural 1 or your result is 10 or more less than the DC, you fall.

If the DM rules that climbing a surface requires a check, you usually make a Strength check to pull yourself up. Your DM might instead ask for a Dexterity check to climb a swaying surface, or a Wisdom check to find the handholds on an invisible wall of force.

Strength Climb Speed11 or less 10 feet12 – 13 15 feet14 – 15 20 feet16 – 17 25 feet18 – 19 30 feet20 35 feet+5 feet/point above 20

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Climb SkillsAs you can see, this approach places the rules for climbing outside of the skill system. You could also imagine that these rules could talk about spiders and other creatures that can climb with ease. Those rules could also show up in the Dungeon Master’s Guide or the Monster Manual. The skill system then steps in to augment your ability to climb. It might look something like this:

Climb Skill

If you are trained in the Climb skill, you gain a +2 bonus on all ability checks made when climbing.

Pretty simple, isn’t it? OK, now let’s make another assumption. Part of the interesting part of skills lies in their ability to customize your character. Rather than focusing on static benefits, the skill system could also offer more active ones. On one hand, you could imagine that really nifty benefits are simply checks with higher DCs. How-ever, that approach adds more rules to the core. Everyone has to learn those DCs and what happens when you hit them. Instead, we can let the DM set DCs based on what a player wants to do using a robust set of guideline DCs. The abilities that a player opts into are simply new talents that the character can use at will. Here’s the Climb skill with a slight tweak to it:

Climb Skill

If you are trained in the Climb skill, you gain a +2 bonus on all ability checks made when climbing and you gain a Climb talent from those listed below. Each time you take training in this skill after the first, increase the bonus it provides by +1 and select another Climb talent.

Cautious Climber: You never fall when making an ability check to climb. If you fail a climb check, you still move half your climb speed.

Fast Climber: You gain a +5 foot bonus to your climb speed. You can take this talent multiple times, but the total bonus it grants cannot be greater than the base climb speed provided by your Strength score.

Spider Climb: You can climb across a horizontal surface at half your climb speed. Climbing in this manner requires a DC 10 Strength check if the surface does not normally require a check. If the surface does require a check to climb, instead increase that DC by 10.

Team Climb: As a standard action, you can grant all allies within 30 feet of you who can hear you a +2 bonus to their climb checks. This bonus lasts for 1 round.

Layers and ComplexityGoing back to my earlier point, you can see how this system can be layered in by a DM. An intro or old school game might either ignore it entirely, relying instead on ability checks. The standard game might assume that characters use skills and skill talents, but the core classes have their skills pre-selected both to hit on the appropriate story elements and to focus on easy but useful options. For example, something like Fast Climber is easy to simply incorporate into an NPC’s climb speed. You could also easily imagine skill talents as an entirely optional rule. I think you’d have to look at the game as a whole and judge whether they are a strong enough concept to live in the core.

Legends and Lore: Difficulty Class Warfare

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Difficulty Class WarfareLegends & Lore Archive | 8/16/2011Last week, I posted some musings on what skills might look like in D&D. I was all set to spend this week talking about the feedback I’ve seen on the forums and elsewhere. (Here’s a secret: It’s really easy to write a column when people ask questions and make observations on your work.) But then Monte Cook (one of the major architects behind 3rd Edition and the d20 system) stepped in and made my life difficult. We were talking about skills and how they work, when Monte had what might be a really interesting idea concerning target numbers and Difficulty Classes. I happen to love it, but I’m biased. Other people I talked with in R&D were less enthusiastic about it, but I think that might involve my inability to explain it properly. So by writ-ing it down and sharing it here, I’m hoping to get a better sense of its worth.

Up, Up, and AwayTo start with, there are a few issues that have been a part of D&D’s approach to skills that I’d like to examine. First, D&D skill checks have usually relied on a d20 or its five times as precise cousin, the d100. A moderately skilled character still faces the hazard of a poor roll leading to failure even at relatively low DCs or high chances of success. The routine skill check is almost always still dangerous in D&D. Second, that pressure gives a big incentive for players to absolutely maximize their skills. With an increasing gap between the specialist and the guy who has made zero investment in a skill, a DM might have trouble creating appropriate challenges. The

problem isn’t the skilled guy, but rather characters who have little chance of hitting a DC of even 10 or 15 due to armor check penalties or low ability bonuses. Third, the specialist gains access to DCs that were meant to be rarely hit or the product of a phenomenal die roll. In 3rd Edition, a DC 20 Diplomacy check causes an enemy to stop attacking you. Even higher checks make them work with you. The idea is a good one, but there’s a strange line to walk for the designer in creating rarely hit DCs and the means by which a character can choose to increase a skill bonus. It’s an arms race that is supposed to end with those high DCs as challenging targets, but all too often creative players can find ways to stack bonuses to make such results trivial. In the abstract, the idea behind setting a DC is twofold. It provides a way to realistically model dif-ficulty. Some things are harder than others, and we expect characters to have a greater chance of failure when attempting them. This approach also allows a DM to see and make judgment calls using a relative scale. If pushing a laden cart is a DC 15 Strength check, then you can see that pushing a massive, stone statue might be DC 25 or 30. The skill system then gives a way for a character to specialize in certain areas, turning what would be a daunting task for the typical character, that DC 25 check, and making it the equivalent of a rou-tine action, DC 10 or 15. The skilled character does things that others characters simply can’t hope to do or would need some luck or natural talent (a high ability modifier) to achieve.

Leveling the FieldThese issues all led Monte to make a proposal that I quite like. Bear with my description, as it takes a dra-matically different approach to skill DCs. In this world, a check DC is no longer a number. Instead, like several rules-light gaming engines, it

uses a series of descriptors that illustrate the mini-mum skill level needed to attempt a task. This list gives the ranks from lowest to highest:

•Novice• Journeyman•Expert•Master•Grandmaster• Impossible

When the DM asks for a check, you compare the DC to your rating in the appropriate skill. Impossible is essentially a placeholder, a rank that applies to things that the DM or the rules deems are doomed to fail-ure. For example, a character who leaps off a cliff and f laps his arms in order to f ly is attempting (and fail-ing) an impossible task. If your skill rank is greater than the task’s DC rank, you automatically succeed. You are so skilled that you can complete the task without any special effort. Think of a tightrope walker at the circus. She has enough training and experience that performing her act is an automatic success. It would take some outside factor, like a sudden injury, an equipment fail-ure, and so on, to cause her to fall. On the other hand, as a sedentary game designer I wouldn’t even imagine trying to walk across a tightrope myself. I’d fall after a step or two. If your skill rank equals the task’s DC rank, you need to make a check with a result of 15 or higher to succeed. You’re skilled enough that you might suc-ceed. In this world, skill checks use an ability score modifier (chosen to fit the task by the DM; a skill uses whatever ability is the best match for the actual action) with perhaps a small modifier based on feats or a skill bonus. Going back to our tightrope walker, perhaps an earthquake strikes in the middle of her act. As the rope sways, the DC shifts one category up. Now she

Legends and Lore: Difficulty Class Warfare

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has to make a check, perhaps with her 18 Dexterity for a +4 bonus as well as a +4 bonus from a feat or other benefit she took. That gives her a 65% chance to remain on the rope. If your skill rank is below the task’s DC rank, you automatically fail. Your training and experience are not enough to complete the task. Going back to the tightrope walker, let’s say that as the earth shakes she also steps on a length of the rope that her rival cov-ered in grease. The difficulty shifts one more category up, causing her to fall to the net below. The DC is based on two things. First, the DM determines a task’s basic difficulty. Then, for each element in play that makes it more difficult, he shifts the difficulty down one rank to the harder level. For elements that make it easier, he shifts it up. Typically, the DM informs you of the DC before you make the attempt. A hidden threat might mean that you don’t know the true DC until you make your attempt, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. Going back to our hapless tightrope walker, per-haps she is carrying a pole to help balance her. The pole gives her an advantage that shifts the DC down one category. When the earthquake hits, she still keeps her balance. When she steps on the greased section of rope, she must then make a check.

Benefits of this ApproachI will readily admit that is a radically different approach to skills in D&D, one that looks nothing like anything in any version of the game. I imagine that 90% of you are ready to lambaste it. However, it’s worth pointing out some of its benefits:

• It dramatically simplifies the math and removes the escalating bonus race.

• It speeds up play by eliminating die rolls in some cases.

• It makes DCs the same across all levels. An expert task is always expert level. We don’t need to shift

difficulties assuming that your bonus continually increases because some characters can remain untrained. The system works by removing the link between difficulty class and level. Instead, we just use a simple, descriptive system as applied to reality.

• It allows trained experts to repeatedly achieve impressive results through practice and training. Just as in real life, a highly trained character can do amazing feats without any real risk of failure (bar-ring any complications or unexpected hazards).

• It more closely models the real world (in my opin-ion, at least) by shaping how we approach tasks. We have an innate sense of things we can do without thought, things that we know to not try, and things that can be challenging. I know that I can walk a mile in 20 minutes without any real effort. I can jog a mile in 15 minutes with some (OK, a lot of ) exer-tion. My sedentary butt would collapse long before I hit a mile if I ran at a 10-minute pace. I don’t need to try these tasks to determine this. I have 36 years of experience to establish what I can do.

• It makes skill training even more valuable because it grants automatic success in easier situations rather than a better chance of success. A sure thing is more valuable than improved odds (a bird in the hand versus two in the bush). A rogue highly trained in Acrobatics or Balance simply scur-ries across a tightrope while the fighter looks for another route. This approach actually encourages players to use their skills more often in dangerous situations by removing random, chance-driven fail-ure as the norm.

• It encourages smart play and engagement. A player with a clever idea can shift the DC one level and turn a check into an automatic success, or an impossible challenge into one with a chance of success. I personally like this because it gives the DM a lot of leeway to use the system to shape his or her game.

• It bakes “impossible” directly into the game. No amount of Diplomacy can sway the raging, blood-thirsty barbarian. It’s off the chart. This may sound like a minor thing, but I think it’s important to set the expectation that the DM can simply invoke common sense or logic to rule that a check will fail regardless of the die roll. Relying on the rules to set what are meant to be impossible DCs is simply asking for trouble.

The Gaping HoleThis approach does not touch on opposed checks. I’ll talk about those next week, or perhaps talk about why you all either hated this idea or saw some merit in it.

Legends and Lore: The Loyal Opposition

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The Loyal OppositionLegends & Lore Archive | 8/23/2011Last week I talked about some skill ideas that Monte Cook and I were batting around. Here’s another idea to consider. A skill represents one of two things:

•Your ability to use your natural talent.•A unique, learned ability.

This is something of a strange approach, so bear with me. Imagine if the skills you can use untrained were instead treated as inherent uses of the abilities. In 4th Edition terms, we’d remove some skills from the game and make them generic rules (as described last week; the skill system doesn’t hide how to do basic things such as climbing and swimming). Each ability then has a training rank attached to it that represents your general aptitude with those tasks that the ability is used to perform. Let’s use Strength as an example. You have a Strength ability score, an ability modi-fier, and a training rank. Whenever you make a Strength check, you use the training rank to deter-mine if you need to make a check and, if so, that check’s DC. You then use your modifier to make that check (if necessary). In 4E terms, Strength training is the equivalent of training your Athletics skill. We just remove the skill as the filter between your Strength score and tasks like climbing, jumping, and swimming. When you increase your Strength rank, you’re learning athletic techniques, practicing, and getting experience in doing stuff with your Strength score. What I like about this approach is that it distin-guishes between the trained athlete and the natural

talent. A character with Strength 18 but a novice rank for Strength checks is a big, strong guy who doesn’t know how to use his power. He dogpaddles when he swims. If you’re a sports fan, he’s the guy who runs fast, but when he’s in the game he’s always out of position. In contrast, the guy with a 10 Strength and grandmaster training is like an elite athlete. He has excellent balance and body control. He knows the best swimming stroke for his style and can translate his raw strength into grace. In sports terms, he’s the savvy veteran who is always in position to score.

Opposed ChecksWith that business dealt with, it’s time to talk about how to handle opposed checks. Under this system, we have a fairly easy way to build a defending character’s DC on an opposed check. Under this system, a skill or an ability contains its own DC. Let’s say I have a 16 Dexterity and expert training in that ability. I need to sneak up on a cleric who has a 14 Wisdom and journeyman training. There’s no opposed check. Instead, the active party, the sneaking guy, makes a journeyman Dexterity check. My expert training wins, meaning that I can sneak up on the cleric. However, let’s now say that the cleric is suspicious of being followed. He takes a moment to scan the area and make a Wisdom check. That check’s DC is matched against my expert Dexterity. He is one rank below me, so he needs to make a DC 20 Wisdom check to notice me. Let’s assume that I’m playing a rogue and I’m tracking the cleric in a shadowy ruin. The cleric, sus-pecting that he’s being followed, casts a light spell down the hallway where I’m lurking before he makes his check. The DM can then drop the DC down one level, to journeyman. The cleric’s target number is now 10. Just as in the system described last week, players (and DMs) are encouraged to engage with the

game setting and come up with ways to tilt the odds in their favor. I have to admit that this is my favorite part of this system. It provides a clear, easy way to shift difficul-ties as a reward for becoming immersed in the game. It encourages the players to get into character and engage with the setting. With this model of opposed checks, we unify everything into one mechanic, rather than needing two separate procedures.

Legends and Lore: Player vs. Character

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Player vs. CharacterLegends & Lore Archive | 8/30/2011Imagine the following scenario. You’re playing D&D and your character comes across a weird statue of a lizard man at the end of a corridor. The statue stands atop a stone block. At this point, what should happen next? If you’re playing one of the earlier versions of D&D, you might ask the DM for more details about the statue. Are there scrapes on the stone f loor around it? Does its base sound hollow? Do any of its limbs look like they can move? If you’re playing 3E or a later version of D&D, you might instead make a Search or Perception check to inspect the statue. With a good roll, the DM might describe the worn section of f loor next to the statue. The DM might even just say that it looks like the statue can be slid to the side. In the first example, the game relies on your abili-ties as a D&D player to find the hollow space hidden beneath the statue. Perhaps you’ve played a lot of D&D and learned to poke around to find hidden objects. You might make a lucky guess, or perhaps you read the DM’s body language or tone when she described the statue. Some cue she gave told you to pay extra attention to it. In the second example, the game challenges your character’s abilities. Maybe you spent plenty of ranks and chose feats that improved your Search or Perception check. You might also just make a lucky roll, allowing a character not otherwise focused on finding hidden objects to spot the statue’s secret. Decisions you made before play, those involving your character’s abilities, play a bigger role in determining your success.

The difference between challenging a character and challenging a player marks the biggest divides between D&D’s early days and its more recent incar-nations. A big part of the early game was learning how to permanently injure a troll, deducing the most likely spots for secret doors, and coming up with cre-ative solutions to problems that couldn’t be solved with the roll of the dice. In order to become a better D&D player, you played lots of D&D and learned the ropes. In 1st Edition, the players didn’t even have access to the combat rules. They were expected to approach the game from their character’s point of view, not the view provided by the rules. Over time, the emphasis changed to focus more on character abilities. Black-and-white rules, rather than ad hoc DM rulings, carried the day. On one hand, this change makes some sense. The game is more predictable, and thus more consistent, regard-less of the DM’s personal style or choices. Players had more options for building unique, detailed characters beyond simply choosing a class and race. The player who dreamed of being a suave, charming rogue could become that character by spending the right combi-nation of feats and skills. The 18 Intelligence wizard truly was a master of lore, thanks to a high check modifier and the right set of training. On the other hand, this change takes away the DM’s ability to manipulate the rules and make pure judgment calls. If there is no system for making Search checks, the DM decides to reveal clues or hidden objects when she judges that the players have done what it takes to find them. The game is intrinsi-cally less immersive because the players look to their character sheets, rather than the environment as described by the DM, to determine what to do. If there was a clear, obvious right answer for which path is the right one, my job would be a lot easier. Comprehensive rules are great, but they can under-mine immersion and run counter to the idea of DM as rules arbiter, world creator, and final decision

Legends and Lore: The Fine Art of Dungeon Mastering

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making authority. Why both reading how the Search skill works if the DM doesn’t use those rules? On the other hand, a more immersive experience can prove very frustrating. The players might end up asking exhaustive, detailed questions about a statue or other feature of the environment. Some DMs might be happy to give clues based on general player descriptions. If you say, “I want to inspect the statue,” the DM tells you that you spot a hidden switch behind it. However, some DMs might require much more detail. The player didn’t specifically say that he was checking out the spot on the f loor directly behind the statue’s base, so the characters don’t find the hidden switch. In this sort of gameplay, exploration can turn into a tedious game of infinite questions. I’ll admit that I prefer a light mechanical touch in these areas. I like an immersive approach to D&D, whether an adventure is heavy on roleplay-ing, exploration, or combat. That’s how D&D worked when I first got into the game, and sometimes I worry that D&D in the post-3E world has lost some of what makes an RPG great in the quest to regulate everything and produce comprehensive mechanics. However, I fully realize that my personal preferences are not necessarily universal. At the end of the day, D&D should work the way you want it to.

The Fine Art of Dungeon MasteringLegends & Lore Archive | 9/6/2011Last week, I talked about the difference between challenging a player’s skill as a D&D player and posing challenges against their character. There are benefits and drawbacks to each approach, but I believe that there is a bigger picture issue at work. Many of the objections to including more chal-lenges against a player’s skill come down to two camps. First, challenging a player rather than a character means that the player’s abilities define what their char-acter can do. This is fine to a point, but it can cause trouble if you want to play a smooth-talking character on a night when work, school, and just stress in general may have left you with the wit and insight of a drunken ogre. If the game lets me play a towering barbarian warrior who can heft a massive axe with ease, why can’t that also extend to a smart, cunning tactician or an insightful, wise prophet? The combat rules let us kick butt. Why shouldn’t the rules also let us become ace detectives or masterful diplomats? We can solve this objection through good rules. If R&D is smart and identifies what people want to do in D&D, we can build those abilities as options into the game. That’s where the idea of the skill system as a tool to customize a character comes in. For that reason alone, I think it’s a good idea to have skills (or a mechanic that fills a similar role) in the game. One of the things I really like about the skill system that Monte Cook created was that it allows an expert to shine. The brilliant diplomat can talk his way past the half-drunk town guards, effortlessly

conning them in a situation that would leave the half-orc fighter tongue-tied. Even better, a player who wants to gain an advantage can engage with the DM, coming up with creative plans and interacting with the game in an immersive way rather than turning to the rules in search of a +2 bonus. The second objection comes down to a DM’s approach. In some cases, the DM can turn the game into an exercise in tedium. In my example from last week, imagine a DM who insists that you cannot find the switch hidden behind the statue unless you spe-cifically state that you look at rear of the base and tap along its length look-ing for a button. The game might drag on and on, forcing the players to detail with painstaking care their exact actions. Even worse, if the statue has nothing of interest hidden on it the play-ers might still spend 10 minutes messing with it. Compounding things, such a DM might never come out and tell the players that there’s nothing there to find. The absence of any hidden element is just proof that you haven’t guessed the right phrase to unlock the secret. We cannot solve this objection via rules. When you sit down to play a traditional, tabletop RPG, you’re accepting that the DM, GM, or whatever the game dubs the person in charge, has a lot of power over how the game works. One of the worrying trends I see in RPGs, and D&D is equally guilty of this, is the idea of using rules to neutralize bad or mediocre DMs. Older rules gave the DM plenty of latitude to make rulings. This approach enabled some great DMing, but it also left inexperienced or simply bad DMs to f lounder. Some

Legends and Lore: Good Fences Make Good Players

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of them improved, while some learned bad habits that drove people away from gaming. These bad habits have emerged across all edi-tions. The linear story that has no real player choice, the Mary Sue NPC who saves the day, the pointlessly murderous game that slaughters PCs with no rhyme or reason—these are all timeworn examples of the art of the DM gone bad. The guy who makes you guess what he’s thinking to progress through the adventure is just as bad. That archetype just happens to be one that, in theory, the rules can negate by specifying the inputs and outputs for skill checks. The cost of insulating the game against one type of bad DM through rules, in my opinion, is too high. Instead, it’s up to the designers to provide good DMing advice, easy to understand meth-ods that beginners can learn, and f lex-ible rules that help DMs build great campaigns and com-pelling adventures. Treating the rules as padding against a bad DM is attacking the problem from the wrong angle. Bad DMs, or inexperienced DMs who could go bad, need good advice and clear instruction on how to get started. To my mind, it’s like blaming a bad writer’s keyboard rather than his or her lack of experience or exposure to skilled teachers and good, instructive texts. On top of all that, the designers always risk taking aim at DM styles that some people actually enjoy. A killer dungeon stocked with ridiculous monsters, opaque puzzles that offer instant death, and elaborate traps that are merciless in dealing destruction to the foolhardy and rash might turn off a story oriented group. At the same time, gamers who love a good

challenge or who want to pit their wits against the DM love that style of game. A well meaning designer could build rules to discourage such a game and end up alienating part of the D&D audience. Such an approach runs counter to the idea of RPG rules as tools for world building and creativity. When looking at the game, R&D needs to make sure that it addresses mechanical problems with mechanical solutions and DM technique issues with advice and guidance. Rules built in fear of a bad DM represent a misplaced priority, effort better spent on showing a DM good techniques and useful approaches.

Good Fences Make Good PlayersLegends & Lore Archive | 9/13/2011Last week I wrote about how rules are a tool for the DM, rather than a way for the game to force the DM into a certain role or to serve as a tonic against DM incompetence. In thinking of the relationship between the rules and the DM, it’s also natural to look at how the rules interact with players. Most importantly, can the rules change bad players into good players? Before we start in on that question, we have to take a moment to consider the definition of a good player. Obviously—and I’m sure I’ve belabored this point—D&D is a game with a diverse player base. People like all sorts of things, and one person’s fun adventure is another’s cure for insomnia; plus, there are defi-nitely people who are good D&D players in terms of making the game more enjoyable, rather than in terms of play skill. With that in mind, are there a few traits that distinguish a good player from a bad one? If so, can the rules help to enforce good play habits over bad ones?

What Would Gary Do?In the Dungeon Master’s Guide for 1st Edition, Gary Gygax wrote at length about troublesome players. From his comments, we can discern the qualities of a good player. To Gygax, bad players “will find more enjoyment in spoiling a game than in playing it, and this ruins the fun for the rest of the participants.” Bad play-ers are “loud and argumentative,” “pout or act in a childish manner when things go against them,” and

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“use the books as a defense when you rule them out of line.” Bad players aren’t just obnoxious toward the DM. They also “attempt to give orders and instruc-tions even when their characters are not present, tell other characters what to do,” and otherwise boss everyone else around. In short, we can see that to Gygax the key to being a good player was simple: Don’t be a jerk. The solution to a bad player was equally simple: Kick them out of your game. Clearly, this was a DM and designer who saw little need for mechanics as a tool to keep play-ers in line. If anything, his disparagement of using the rules to override the DM places a clear divide between the rules of the game and the rules of behav-ior at the table. The rules were a tool for the DM, not for the players. The DM set the rules of the table, using the rulebooks as he or she wished. “Don’t be a jerk” is a fairly simple rule, but one that requires a little more illumination. In looking over the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide and a few other books, I think we can make a list of good player traits that includes the following:

•A good player gives others the space to make deci-sions and do fun stuff.

•A good player gives the DM the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the rules.

•A good player focuses on the group, rather than himself.

•A good player becomes immersed in the action by paying attention and focusing on the game.

These rules are by no means set in stone, and dif-ferent groups can interpret them differently. For example, making fun of an NPC shows that a player is paying attention to the game, and if the comments are genuinely funny they help everyone have a good time. However, other groups might prefer a more serious approach. At the end of the day, what matters

the most is that the players and the DM are all on the same page. With these ideas in mind, we can return to the original question. Can the rules help turn bad players into good ones? I believe so, and I think it comes down to, conve-niently enough, another bullet point list:

•Balanced rules help give everyone the chance to contribute.

•Hitting the right handling time gives everyone the right amount of time in the spotlight.

• Streamlined rules let players pick options and use them without upsetting the game.

Balance helps avoid a lot of tension around the table by making each player feel like he or she can con-tribute meaningfully to the game. If a player needs to work against a broken class or combo to make the game fun, then the rules are getting in the way. Ide-ally, each player can use his spells, feats, and so on in the most efficient manner possible without inadver-tently running roughshod over everyone else. Good rules also help give everyone a chance to shine during a session. A good initiative system gives everyone a few moments to sit at the center of atten-tion. Ideally, the game’s handling time—the time in seconds it takes to do something—is quick enough to keep the action f lowing but long enough that the player taking a turn feels like he has made a useful contribution. His turn wasn’t so quick that he barely had anything to do, nor so long that the rest of the group grew sick of waiting. Finding the middle ground is a good goal for any rule set. By the same token, rules need to hit the right level of complexity to keep the action f lowing. If the system for casting a spell is intricate and time consuming, the guy playing the wizard either has to hold back on using magic or just accept that he’s hogging the spotlight.

A good player can overcome any of these short-comings, but a player’s energy is better served in portraying his character, immersing in the envi-ronment, coming up with cunning plans, and so on, rather than working against the system. A good system encourages good play.

Legends and Lore: DM Rules and Exciting News

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DM Rules and Exciting NewsLegends & Lore Archive | 9/20/2011Last week, I wrote about the role of the rules: to help enforce the sort of player behaviors that make D&D more enjoyable for the entire group. There are few specific rules to encourage good play, but mostly the rules help ensure that players can portray their char-acters, use their spells and magic items, and engage in the game without worry of accidentally making it a miserable experience. This week, I’d like to take the same approach with the DM. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the impor-tance of using good advice to guide DMs. Rules can’t replace good advice, and it’s important to keep that in mind when working on the game. However, that does not mean that rules can’t help the DM. If we think about the qualities of a good DM, we can look at rules that encourage the DM to “do right” by the players and the campaign. To start with, what makes a good DM? Here are the traits that I think make the difference between an average DM and a good one:

•A good DM brings the action to life with narration, acting, and dialogue

•A good DM pulls no punches when it comes to chal-lenging the players

•A good DM builds problems and lets the players create solutions to them. (In other words, the DM avoids rigid, single-solution challenges.)

•A good DM balances risks versus rewards•A good DM reacts to the players and allows their

decisions to affect the world, alter an NPC’s course of action, or otherwise matter to the game

Some of these traits fall almost entirely in the realm of good DM advice. Rules can’t help you spice up the orc cleric of Yurtrus by describing its rotting teeth, leprous skin, and oozing sores. Rules don’t make interesting NPCs; the DM makes interesting NPCs. However, there are still a few areas where the rules can help a good DM. Most of these come down to balance. With a well-balanced system, the DM can build an adventure or a world with a good idea of how things work. I’ve brought this point up before, and I’ll repeat it here. If the DM wants the red dragon guard-ing Longfang Pass to be a threat, he needs to know how that dragon matches up to an adventuring party. There’s nothing lamer than building up the dragon as this tough foe, only to watch a party of 2nd-level char-acters stomp it into the ground with no special effort. In some ways, balance speaks to verisimilitude. It makes sense that a red dragon can feast on neophyte adventurers, so the rules should back that up. A well-balanced system ensures that the dragon is as tough as advertised. By the same token, a good system for generat-ing treasures helps balance the risk and reward in the game. A monster is well balanced if the DM has a good idea of its relative power. A magic item or treasure hoard is well balanced if the DM easily understands its worth relative to the challenge that must be overcome to obtain it. In the typical game, it’s lame if a single, unarmed kobold totes a +5 holy avenger and 10,000 gp. On the other hand, an ancient black dragon with a treasure of five rusty spoons and a broken accordion is out of place (barring a good story for it). To my mind, the rules are at their best when I can create the basic outline of an adventure or dungeon map, pick a few key monsters, drop them into rooms, and fill in the rest at random. Some of the random stuff might be especially dangerous or weak. The same might apply to randomly generated treasures. The key is that once I understand the system, I can

spot outliers and create explanations and stories around them, or smooth out those spots as I see fit. There’s another area where the rules can help the DM. A good DM needs an action resolution mechanic that’s easy to use and quick to apply to new situations. It’s much harder to run games that encourage immer-sion, improvisation, and creative play if the DM has to stop for five minutes to figure out how to do some-thing. The best mechanics are simple, intuitive, and

Legends and Lore: Very Perceptive

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easy to remember, allowing DMs and players to learn them by heart and keep the game moving.

And Now for Some Exciting NewsIt’s funny to look back and realize that I’ve written this column once a week for over eight months. Alas, as with all things, it’s time for my involvement with this column to end. However, that does not mean that Legends & Lore is going away. We’ve been very happy with the response to the series, the interest it has cre-ated, and the feedback we’ve received. Starting next week, I’m turning this column over to acclaimed game designer Monte Cook. Monte should be familiar to D&D fans for his work on the Planescape campaign setting, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, Arcana Unearthed, the mammoth Ptolus city sourcebook, and, of course, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. I’ve spent the past several months talking about D&D’s past and how that relates to its future. It’s now time to focus much more on the future of the game. Monte has an unmatched design pedigree in the RPG field, and for that reason we’ve brought him on board to work with R&D in making D&D the greatest RPG the world has seen. Over the next few weeks, Monte will use this column to share his thoughts about the game. As we look to chart D&D’s future course, this column will continue to be a place where we share our ideas and listen to yours, and we hope you’ll keep reading, discussing the contents, and sharing your feedback and thoughts with us and the larger D&D community. That’s what makes Legends & Lore a con-versation that we can all participate in.

Very PerceptiveLegends & Lore Archive | 9/27/2011

I’m Monte Cook, a game designer work-ing with the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. Welcome to Legends & Lore, a weekly column where I share some thoughts about the game, its his-tory, and its future. I’m mostly interested in the essence of the game, and what makes D&D really D&D. I’m also very interested in what you think, because ultimately it’s the people playing the game that define it.

Hello! As my good friend Mike Mearls mentioned last week, there are some changes here with the column. The biggest being that I’m writing it. Who am I? Monte Cook. I was one of the co-designers of 3rd edi-tion D&D. I have worked full time as a game designer since the late 80s, including a long stint with TSR and then Wizards of the Coast when the latter bought the former. I did a lot of work with 2nd edition D&D, helped transition to 3rd edition, and then ran my own d20 company, Malhavoc Press, to continue to explore the possibilities of that rules set on my own. Now I’m back working alongside the other great designers at Wizards of the Coast. I can’t tell you how good it feels to be back, working with the game I love. It’s amazing. And it gets even better. My job is primarily to explore options. It’s the “research” part of “Research & Development.” The goal I’ve been given is to make D&D the best game it can possibly be. It is and always

has been the premier roleplaying game in the world, and I want to make sure it continues to be. Of course, that’s a very special challenge, if you think about it. A game like D&D has to move for-ward, but it also has to stay true to its roots. If you’ve got a game that’s been adored for almost four decades, while you do what you can to bring in new players, you try to please those who have loved and supported the game for so long. Like me. I started in 1978 or so with the three little booklets, usually called Original D&D or OD&D now. I moved from there to AD&D, and have played every other version and edition of the game at one time or another. I can’t even begin to calcu-late the thousands of hours I have spent playing or

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preparing for the game, let alone talking about it, thinking about it, and of course working profession-ally with it. I think, then, it comes as no surprise for me to say, I love Dungeons & Dragons.

Diving Right InIf you really roll up your sleeves and dig down to the basics of D&D—the basics of almost any RPG, really—what you find is either a unique way to create a narrative or a unique way to play a game. (We can debate storytelling vs. game playing some other day.) Either way you want to look at it, you have one person who has information and others who want infor-mation. The players (through their characters) are moving through the fictional world and need to know what it’s like and what the consequences of their decisions and actions are. The DM is managing the fictional world. But how is that information conveyed? How does he know what to tell and what not to tell? Simple, really. The DM is the eyes and ears of the players. If they can see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, or touch it, he should tell them about it. We all know, of course, that it’s a bit trickier than that, because some-times things are hidden. It’s the classic dungeon scenario. You can see it right there on the cover of the first edition Player’s Handbook. The PCs have slain the monsters, and now they’re searching for treasure. Some of the char-acters look around, while others busy themselves with the map or something. A couple of guys specifi-cally check out the huge statue. Ideally, it doesn’t all come down to just a roll of the dice. Ideally, the play-ers actually interact with the room. They tell the DM that they search the statue, look in the massive bra-zier that it’s holding, and check out the two smaller ones as well. Maybe one of those big teeth on the statue is a lever that opens a secret panel. Maybe one is hollow and holds a secret treasure.

That kind of discussion around the table is dynamic. It’s interesting. It should be rewarded. It encourages the skill and imagination of players more than characters. And it would be horrible if a poor die roll wrecked it all. Imagine, then, if the rules of the game allowed each character to have a “rank” that indicated how perceptive they were, and if all the hidden things had a rank as well. You could quickly and easily com-pare the ranks. If the character’s rank was equal to or higher than the rank of the secret door or other hidden thing, he could find it if he took the time, because it was easy for him. No die roll needed. He can just do it because he’s very perceptive. If the rank of the hidden thing was higher, though, he could still try to succeed at a die roll. It’s challenging, but not impossible (the sweet spot, if you will). And if the difficulty rank was a lot higher, it would just be impossible, and again there’s no need for the die roll. The DM just says “you don’t find anything.” Quick and easy. And best of all, if the player told the DM that his character was doing exactly the right thing—checking the statue’s teeth to see if one moved—the DM could easily grant him a bonus to his rank and make what was impossible to find, possible. Player ingenuity rewarded. That’s the straightforward, active perception issue, but what about what I like to call “passive per-ception?” You know: when the PCs aren’t actually looking for something, but it stands to reason that some one or more of them might just have a chance of noticing the hidden thing. Remember, for example, how in first 1st edition elves had a chance to notice secret doors just by walking by them? Or what about the rogue who always has a wary eye out for traps? You don’t want these guys constantly making die rolls every 5 feet. The game will bog down quickly. Again, if we look to the rank idea, the DM can just make a note that the elf has an Expert rank, and thus he knows that if, in the course of exploration, she walks

by any secret doors of Expert rank or lower, she spots them. Higher, and she doesn’t (no die rolls at all—because the die roll itself tells the metagaming player that there’s something to find, and the DM having to make rolls for the player behind the screen is awkward). Likewise, the rogue can always be on the lookout for traps without routine walking around the dungeon becoming a chore. It’s only when he’s being really cautious that he can state that he searches the door or the chest or whatever. And then we handle things as described above, thus rewarding smart play. This is all a way to handle the f low of informa-tion—particularly secret information—quickly and easily, with die rolls involved only when it really mat-ters. So that we can keep the game moving at a lively pace without sacrificing the fun of exploring the envi-ronment with dynamic play and creative ideas. So that the rules don’t get in the way of the fun. I look forward to hearing what you have to say on the matter. This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more ideas to talk about. Some crazy, some hopefully not so crazy. It’ll be up to you to tell me which is which.

Legends and Lore: Magic and Mystery

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Magic and MysteryLegends & Lore Archive | 10/4/2011D&D covers a lot of topics. My work with the game, then, can seem almost schizophrenic as I leap from subject to subject. You’ll have to bear with me. There’s no good transition for me to be able to tell you that last week I wrote about perception so of course this week I’ll be discussing . . . magic items. Magic items have been a part of the game since the beginning. Initially, they were one of the biggest ways to differentiate your character from the others. Two 6th-level fighters in OD&D were pretty similar, but if one had a f lame tongue sword and the other wore a helm of brilliance, they felt very different in play. Over the years, magic items have become some-thing that most players simply expect. In fact, in later editions of the game, characters were balanced with expected encounters assuming a certain level of magical gear. While that might be accurate, it raises a couple of problems. First, treasure ends up being a part of the char-acters’ advancement track, not a reward. If the core story of D&D is that adventurers go down into a dungeon to fight monsters and gain treasure, the monsters and the treasure should be story elements, not mechanical elements. What I mean by that is that they should be driven by the logic of the world, not the needs of the game system. The characters should know that there are easy challenges and hard chal-lenges out there, and should have a choice of which to face. And, generally speaking, the harder the chal-lenge, the greater the reward. One might think that a 4th-level character shouldn’t have a +3 sword, but if, through smart (and sure, probably lucky) play he legitimately overcame appropriate obstacles to get it,

shouldn’t he get it? Likewise, if a 10th-level character is still fighting crippled kobolds and half-strength goblins, he should have very little in the way of trea-sure, right? A +3 sword shouldn’t just fall out of the sky for him because that’s what 10th-level characters should have. Shouldn’t rewards be, well, rewards? Under such a paradigm, dangling the promise of great treasure means something. Working harder really will get the PCs ahead. Second, if magic items are assumed, they lose some of their mystery. Players talk about it all the time: “Magic in the game just doesn’t seem, well, mag-ical.” And it’s a fair point. I think what they’re missing

is the mystery. Magic should be weird and mysteri-ous, and when it’s presented as a regimented list of carefully balanced and well-defined spells or powers, it’s hard to retain any mystery. Anything presented in the Player’s Handbook, almost by definition, isn’t going to be mysterious for long. We actually expect players to have read through that stuff. This means that tradi-tionally, DMs have had a better shot at making magic mysterious by introducing weird magic items into their games. Why? Because for most of the game’s history, magic items fell under the purview of the DM. Players just never knew what they were going to get when they opened up that chest and found the

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various objects inside. A sword? Okay, we probably know what that’s going to do. A wand? Could be any manner of magical spell inside. An amulet? A ring? Those could be anything. Which is great. But if the players come to expect certain treasure items, or if they can just go to a magic item shop in a large city and buy what they want, there’s no mystery there. This means that to restore mystery to magic, one great way would be to complexly decouple magic items from character advancement. Yeah, you read that right. What if the game assumed no magic items? What if magic items really were just hard-fought-for treasure that made characters better? A DM could run as high or low magic a campaign as he wanted. Players who beat the dragon would just be better off than those that played it safe. As I wrote ear-lier, working harder really will get the PCs ahead. Those that succeed at greater challenges will be more powerful than those that don’t. That seems to be a bit of the heart and soul of D&D that has somehow become lost. Rather than a strict system telling the DM what the players should have at a given level, the game instead could provide a DM with guidelines and suggestions for what would happen if he introduced various kinds of items into his campaign. Thus, the DM is armed with knowledge, but free to do whatever he or she sees fit. What kind of doors does that open? Interesting ones, I think. If magic items aren’t something easily purchased and aren’t carefully equated to character level, there’s suddenly a lot more room for them to be stranger, more idiosyncratic, and in general more interesting. You could have a rod that works like a +1 mace until it is thrown into the pit of darkness in the Fortress of Lum the Mad, at which point it allows the wielder to open a portal to another plane. And you wouldn’t have to agonize how to price it fairly as a game balancing mechanism. You would just assign a price logically. (And really, shouldn’t the price of a magic item be its least important facet? It’s certain the least interesting.)

A Tool for the DMThere’s another aspect to magic items that doesn’t get talked about much. Magic items also provide an inter-esting way for the DM to have a role in customizing characters. A good DM can subtly influence the way characters act and deal with challenges by what items he or she puts in the treasure hoards they uncover. For example, if the DM thinks it might be fun if the PC wizard summoned more monsters, he could place a brazier of fire elementals in the dungeon for her to find. If the DM would like to see more planar adventures in the campaign, the drow priestess the PCs defeat might possess a cubic gate. And so on. This means that the DM could place treasure (where appropriate) that he wants the characters to have rather than what the game system tells him they’re supposed to have. And certainly not what the players are saying they’re supposed to have. Players can play a role in what items they acquire, but it’s a story-based role, not a mechanical one. If a wizard player wants to have a robe of the archmagi, she can research where one might be, learn what chal-lenges must be overcome to obtain it, and undertake that quest, hopefully with the help of her friends. Thus, whether it’s a decision to go to the deeper level of the dungeon to get the better loot in general or a quest for a specific item, magic items could return to their original role, which is to be a driving force behind adventures.

Live Together, Die AloneLegends & Lore Archive | 10/11/2011From time to time in this column, it’s likely that I’m going to come back to some of the truly genius aspects of the Dungeons & Dragons game. And when I write that, I don’t mean something from one edition or another, but from the game taken as a whole. In other words, I’m discussing things that were true from the first day of the game, and are still true today. There are many things along these lines, but the one I’m thinking about at this moment as I ponder all things D&D is the teamwork aspect of the game. When Gary Gygax passed away, the officiate at the funeral service said—and I’m paraphrasing now, because it’s been a few years—that it says a lot about a man who is best known for creating a game where the players worked together toward a common goal rather than against each other to get some prize. There’s truth in that. I love to see a group in the game working well together, using powers and abilities to help one another, and complementing each others’ strengths and weaknesses. A group that learns to operate like that is truly greater than the sum of the whole. The game is designed to be a group activity, with players taking on different roles that fit together like puzzle pieces when assembled. Where one class is weak, another is strong. Each has a vital role to play. Every-one has something to do. A moment to shine. Many classes have traditionally had powers that aided others. Clerics, for example, have always had a role in healing other characters. Bards, when they came along a bit later in the history of the game, inspired their comrades, granting them bonuses

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or other aid. In more recent years, warlords have appeared to facilitate the combat actions of others. Other classes through the years have wielded similar powers. Some people avoid classes like that, or even criticize them. They say that using an action to help someone else is a waste of that action. They’d rather use all of their own game time inflicting damage and being the star—and that’s fine. There’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting to be powerful and cool. That’s a big part of the game. But what people who criticize “action wasting actions” don’t realize is that there are people who actively enjoy helping others. Whether it’s getting someone else into the fight faster, giving others a bonus, or helping someone with an aff liction or wound, this kind of player finds the endeavor rewarding. It’s an interesting divide in the

way roleplayers think sometimes. (And of course, to be sure, even those who find giving aid rewarding like to be able to inflict damage and do interesting things on their own as well.) Helping others is clearly a valid way to contrib-ute to the team effort, and it earns one the gratitude of the other players. Doing so even inspires others to reciprocate when possible. I can think of a dozen stories off the top of my head of people sacrificing themselves in order to save the cleric, for example, because of all that character had done (and would continue to do) for the party. These nurturing, facili-tating characters become the lynchpin of the group as often as not. From a game design standpoint, there’s a tempta-tion to build fewer classes that have to make sacrifices to help others. But what if you looked at it from the

point of view of the people who enjoy giving of them-selves to help their friends, and simply made those options easier to accomplish and more rewarding? Rather than try to make the cleric or the bard a class everyone wants to play, you could look at the type of player that likes clerics or bards and really play up those aspects of the class that they like. Then, however, you get the people who say that you can’t play the game without a particular class. In older editions of the game, for example, having at least one cleric was a must. But there’s a difference between making a class that is required and a class everyone’s happy to have along. In fact, all classes should be designed from that point of view—not indis-pensible, but incredibly valuable when they are in their element. Lastly, it might be worth taking a look at giving everyone more opportunities to aid their comrades. Not just with healing, but with actions and abilities that help others to do well. You could, for example, institute more generous “aid another” or cooperative action rules. Heroic characters might be able to step in and take damage for their endangered allies. You could, in fact, tailor a special option toward every class that gives them some unique way of helping their friends. From the earliest days of the game, the various classes were created to fit together as a whole. The point was less about self-sufficiency (although that could be attained with the right items or what have you) and more about teamwork. Gary himself wrote again and again in articles, books, and even in mod-ules that smart play—and in particular teamwork and cooperation--was a goal unto itself and the key to overcoming the serious challenges the game had to offer.

Legends and Lore: Preserving the Past

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Preserving the PastLegends & Lore Archive | 10/18/2011In my new role at Wizards of the Coast, I am compelled to look over the entire run of the game, not just the most recent products. My job has little to do with quibbles over this edition or that, and everything to do with the big picture view of the game. That means almost 40 years of history—rules, classes, spells, adventures, and, of course, monsters. In that context, I was chatting with game designer Rob Schwalb at lunch the other day about D&D mon-sters. He made the excellent point that the monsters of the past need to be preserved for their own sake. We reminisced about a lot of old-school monsters that hadn’t been updated to the latest edition—or the latest two editions. Or even three. That’s going to happen, of course, but we agreed that it would be a terrible thing if we actually went so far as to say that a certain mon-ster never existed. We both reflected back on our youth, when neither of us ever thought that a new monster in a product was stupid. I remember buying the original 1st Edition Fiend Folio. Back then, I looked at a mon-ster like the three-legged, three-headed tirapheg and didn’t dismiss it as silly. Instead, I concluded that it wasn’t for me. It might work well in someone else’s campaign, just not mine. The Fiend Folio and the Monster Manual II had many such creatures. At worst, I would say, No, I won’t use that, but it’s interesting. At

best, when I came upon a monster that didn’t strike my fancy or suggest an immediate use, I took it as a challenge. How do I make the gorbel or the denzelian cool and work in my game? Of course, most of the time, this wasn’t an issue. Many, many of the monsters were just really cool. Reading a monster book was a wonderful pastime all by itself, because so many of the creatures within just suggested new encounters and new monsters, and made me eager to play. Similarly, I remember working on 3rd edition and having to make tough monster choices. In the end, for example, we included many new creatures in the Monster Manual and left out some classics such as the peryton and the leucrotta. I always felt bad about having to do that, not because they were the epitome of awesome (although they both had their charm) but because each represented a piece of game history. It’s important, I think, to acknowledge and preserve the game’s roots. Even as we create new material for the latest product, we should be looking backward to see if there are lessons to be remem-bered or bits of the past to bring forward, because just about any monster is someone’s favorite creature or figured into someone’s favorite adventure, and that player or DM is going to want to keep using that thing he or she loved. Like the peryton or leucrotta in 3E. Or the dire corby, a somewhat lackluster monster that was given new life in R.A. Salvatore’s novels. If pre-serving someone’s favorite means having to do a little work to give a creature a niche or a slightly different appearance or mechanical take, well, that’s a creative challenge. And this isn’t true of just monsters, of course. Spells and magic items, for example, are impor-tant legacies of the past. This is perhaps also true of something like feats, but I believe it’s more relevant to monsters, races, spells, and items, because these things all carry story weight as well as mechanical weight. A DM who creates a 1st or 2nd edition world

with modrons in it shouldn’t be left out in the cold just because he converts to 3rd edition. We don’t want the story aspects of that guy’s campaign wrecked any more than we want to hurt the mechanical aspects of it with new rules. I also think there’s value in being true to one’s roots. History is important. If we don’t know what the game was like 10, 20, or 30 years ago, we’re refusing to learn from any of those years of design and play, and that’s just short sighted. Plus, ignor-ing history is just going to cause us to trip over what we’ve already done. For example, rather than rein-vent the wheel with some new item that changes one’s appearance quickly and easily, a designer should just make use of the hat of disguise. Generate new material, to be sure, but don’t create something new if there’s already something like that in the game. Thinking back, I think the game began to lose sight of its own past in the mid to late 2nd Edition

Legends and Lore: Rules, Rules, Rules

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cycle. I remember watching as new monsters or items were created without designers even noticing that very similar things already existed in the game. That’s how, for example, the game ended up with so many doglike monsters with terror-inducing howls or barks. Of course, now that those redundant aspects of the game exist as a part of our glorious past, I suppose it behooves us to give them each their own niche or make a conscious decision not to reinvent them at all, with the understanding that we won’t ever remove them from the game or disavow their existence.

Rules, Rules, RulesLegends & Lore Archive | 10/25/2011I spend a lot of time thinking about how the rules affect the game—not just whether an ability should offer a +2 or +3 bonus, but how the existence and expression of the rule affects the way the game is played. I used to say that rules and game play were separate aspects of the game that didn’t really inter-act. I’d like that to be true, but it’s not. While some people say—correctly—that a masterful Dungeon Master can run a good game using any rules set, one can also say that a rules set can encourage or discour-age good game play. In a way, any time a designer puts a rule in a rulebook, he is saying “no” to the DM. The rule takes away the DM’s ability to make a judgment call in her game. It’s something for a rules lawyer to point to and tell her that she’s handled something incorrectly. Now, am I stating that there should be no rules, and the game should just be freeform with the DM in charge? Of course not. The game needs rules. They form the basis of the shared reality that allows everyone to participate in the same game. And that foundation should be something that everyone play-ing the game adheres to (more or less), including the DM. The DM can change the rules, of course, but the whole group has to buy off on those changes. A game designer can affect the play of the game by how a rule is presented, and what is said or not said within the framework of that rule. Let’s look at an in-depth example: the rules for climbing. Climbing rules in the game could be presented in some different ways. For example:

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Option 1 Climb: Characters move at half speed when climbing.

Option 2 Climb: Characters move at half speed when climbing. You must make a Climb check to ascend a vertical surface, with a Difficulty Class based on the difficulty of the climb. You grant combat advantage to oppo-nents while you climb.

Option 3 Climb: Characters move at half speed when climbing. You must make a Climb check to ascend a vertical surface, with a Difficulty Class based on the difficulty of the climb. A Climb check is a skill check based on a character’s Strength score plus the number of skill ranks he has devoted to the Climb skill, if any. If you fail the check, you make no progress. If you fail the check by more than 5, you fall. You can make a check to catch yourself again before you take falling damage, the DC of which is equal to the Climb DC of the surface plus 5. The difficulty class of the climb is based on the incline of the surface, the number of handholds, and the slickness of the surface. See the chart below. Climbing counts as movement. A climber’s kit adds to the climber’s check, as do various magical items such as a potion of climbing or a ring of climbing and so on. You grant combat advantage to opponents while you climb. If you suffer damage while climbing, you must make an immediate check or fall. You can attempt to climb faster, using your normal speed, but your check is made with a –5 penalty. Creatures with a natural climb speed do not need to make Climb checks and ignore difficult terrain while climbing.

Typical Climb DCs include:

Surface DCLadder 0Knotted rope 5Rope 10Uneven surface 15Rough surface 20Slippery surface +5Unusually smooth surface +5Corner with two surfaces to brace against –5Chimney (two opposite walls to brace against) –10

ConclusionExperienced players will note that the last entry is sort of a weird collision of 3rd edition and 4th edition rules. I did that because minor edition dif-ferences are not the point. For our purposes today, the specifics of the rule itself aren’t as important as the overall approach. Obviously, the first example is extremely sparse. If that were the rule, there might be a rule somewhere else that suggests that anytime you have your hands full and are preoccupied, you grant combat advantage. But the idea of the approach is to let the DM make calls as she sees fit, using logic and circumstance as her guide. In a game with this rule, the DM might only call for a check to climb if it seemed appropriate. She might never do so, in fact, and might assume that there is no success or failure involved with climb unless it seemed right, in the same way that there is no success or failure condi-tions for walking across the f loor. The second example is slightly meatier, and in no way contradicts the first. However, it suggests that there is a mechanic for determining success. That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. It changes the entire expectation of the act of climbing. Now the player reading the rule not only knows that some climbs are harder but also expects that some

characters and creatures are better at making them. The reader also knows that there is a set combat effect of climbing, and the rule requires that he under-stand what “combat advantage” means. Still, the difficulty of each individual climb remains entirely in the hands of the DM, as are corner-case situations such as falls. Using this rule, for example, some DMs might call for a saving throw while others might ask for another climb check in order to allow someone to catch themselves. The third example does not contradict the other two but is expansive in detail. DCs are set, corner-cases are covered. It takes most of the assumptions of the second version and sets everything further in stone. It ensures that everyone’s going to be using climbing in their game the same way, and it doesn’t force the DM to make any on-the-f ly decisions about how climbing works in the game. At the same time, it’s potentially cumbersome in its description and the amount of information provided, at least compared to the other two. In a game using this rule, it’s easy to imagine that any time someone wants to climb a sur-face, someone’s going to crack open a book to check the mechanics of it. So while the actual mechanics that we’re talking about are the same, the way each version of the rule is presented will have very different effects on how the game is actually played once everyone’s sitting around the table. More detail does not necessarily mean better rules, but fewer details do not necessarily mean a simpler game.

Legends and Lore: Getting the Most Out of the Rules

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Getting the Most Out of the RulesLegends & Lore Archive | 11/1/2011Last week, I talked about the effect that rules presen-tation can have on a game, specifically as it pertains to the sheer amount of rules material. This week, I’d like to continue that discussion and talk about the language used in rule writing, as it pertains to the D&D game. It’s fascinating to look at the evolution of the lan-guage and detail in rule writing starting in 1974 Dungeons & Dragons all the way through to today. Overall, there has been a general trend toward more precise and formal language, and away from a conversational tone. Precision is good and useful. Conversational language is more readable and usu-ally more enjoyable. Therein lies the issue. Few people read instruction manuals for fun. They’re typically dry and boring. But instruction manuals are written the way they are for a reason. They need to get important information to the reader clearly and precisely. Sometimes, changing one word, or even the order of words, can hinder the usability of the instructions. If I’m reading a manual on how to disarm a bomb, I want it to be as precise as possible. Dry and boring is just fine. But D&D books aren’t bomb-defusing manuals. They’re game books about dragons, adventures, and tales of heroism. When people read a D&D rulebook, should it really be as dry and boring as a technical manual? Should it be full of precise jargon, keywords, and templated text? Or should it contain story text that inspires the imagination, giving DMs and players alike new ideas for adventures and characters?

You might argue that game rules and story have to live in the same book, and when it comes to rules, they need to be precise, or else how can you use them correctly? Some of the concepts in the game are com-plex, and without carefully worded descriptions free of conversational tone and f lavor text, how can we expect gamers to use them? I’m going to argue that a good game writer can do both. I think that game rulebooks and adventures can be presented in such a way that convey the needed information and yet still are exciting and interesting to read. However, I’m going to also argue that this bal-ance is something that throughout the history of the game D&D has only done with moderate success, and usually veers too much in one direction or the other. When I got my start in the game, around 1978 or so, it was with the original D&D set. Those books belonged to my friends, however. The first books that I personally owned were all 1st edition. I used to buy and read the products that came out (mostly adven-tures, back then) just for fun. I played the game a lot as well, but part of the D&D hobby experience for me was just reading the products and letting my imagi-nation soar. When I read an adventure, sometimes I would think about the great story potential contained within, or it would inspire me to create my own stories. Other times, I would imagine what would happen if I used the adventure in my campaign. How would my players react? How would I react if I was a player? How would I run such a fun yet complex series of encounters? I am certain that I am not alone in this. I firmly believe that fun-to-read, imaginative rules and support material is vital to the whole D&D experience. I also believe that rules need to be writ-ten, developed, and edited very carefully so that the meaning is clear. It’s a game, not a novel. If the designer’s not communicating his rules clearly, he’s not doing his job.

To have both, a game designer must make sacri-fices. Jargon, for example, is helpful in rules clarity but makes a conversational tone very difficult. Imagi-native f lavor text can get in the way of readability, particularly in a rule that is going to be referenced over and over again. The choice between “fun to read” and “precise” needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Certain rules can be simple and straightforward, while other matters can be handled more conversationally or filled with inspirational descriptions of people, places, or events. D&D gamebooks are like no other form of writ-ing. Something like the Player’s Handbook needs to be equal parts teaching tool, reference work, and muse. Someone is going to sit down and read that book to

Legends and Lore: Customized Complexity

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learn how to play. They need things explained care-fully and often in detail. That same person will refer to that book over and over again while playing. Then they need everything to be straightforward and suc-cinct to keep the game moving. They also need that book to inspire them to create fantasy characters and adventures. In this case, they need imagina-tive hooks, references, and ideas that send them off on their own f lights of fantasy. All three of those aspects usually come in the form of entirely differ-ent books. To ask a book to serve all three at once is a real challenge. Fortunately, game designers like a challenge.

Customized ComplexityLegends & Lore Archive | 11/8/2011At its earliest roots, Dungeons & Dragons had very little customization to offer. You rolled your stats (and if your DM was mean, you didn’t even get to arrange them), picked your class, and you went into the dun-geon. Character customization came in what weapon you chose to wield (although even this choice was dictated heavily by your class), or which spell—singu-lar—you memorized. Customization grew in leaps and bounds through the editions. Non-weapon proficiencies, kits, skills, feats, powers, themes . . . soon players had many, many options with which to shape their character. Want your fighter to be a former cook from the king’s court? No problem. Want your wizard to have trained with poisoned shuriken in a dojo? It can be done. The mantra has always been that you should get to play the character you want to play. And that’s a fine mantra. But hang on a minute. Was it really impossible to create the character you want in those early days? By having no skills, feats, and so on, you could—in theory—create anything at all. Nothing was stopping you from being the former cook from the king’s court. And the poisoned shuriken? Well, it would probably take DM approval, but are they really all that differ-ent from the darts your wizard is already allowed? Sure, earlier editions had a lot of roadblocks. In 1st edition, a cleric couldn’t use a battleaxe, ever. In 2nd edition, half lings couldn’t be bards. And so on. But while few or no mechanics to customize your charac-ter meant no f lavor to some players, to others it meant that the sky’s the limit.

Customization to many people involves choices that mean something. You don’t want to just declare that your character used to be the cook from the king’s court, you wanted the skill bonus to back up that claim. If D&D is going to quantify combat prow-ess, it should quantify noncombat actions, if not as well, at least to some degree. A valid expectation. The details that provide the ability to create the character you want in a meaningful way add com-plexity. Kits, skills, feats, powers, and so on are all new mechanics you have to learn. And since char-acter customization is important—perhaps most important—at 1st level, you have to learn them right out of the gate. Suddenly, you end up with a game system requiring hours to create a new character. Having lots of tools to customize characters is good for players. Lots of complexity is bad for play-ers. Again, we face a dilemma. Like so much of game design, it involves identifying a broad spectrum and then picking the proper spot on that spectrum for that game. While for some it’s hard to realize that there is indeed a spectrum, the key words there really are “for that game.” What’s right for one game won’t be right for another. So what’s right for D&D? Well, D&D has seen the gamut. From no complex-ity devoted to customization to a lot. D&D players of different eras are used to different things. Rather than just choose a spot on the spectrum, then, which will please some but not all, what if we left it up to each individual group? What if D&D gave you the tools and you chose whether or not to use them? This would mean that some, or perhaps even all, of the various subsystems that exist (and have existed for a long time) in character development would be optional. This would include all the skills and feats and various pieces that go into customizing a charac-ter. A radical approach, really. One that would greatly affect game play, but I want to just focus on charac-ter development and creation right now. If you strip

Legends and Lore: Out of Bounds

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these things away—from a character creation point of view—you’re essentially left with ability scores, race, class, hit points, armor class/defenses, and gear. Interestingly, something that looks a lot like a 1st edition character or even an OD&D character. The other things could be layered on as desired. Again, as an interesting thought experiment, you could layer on a couple options (kits and proficiencies) and have something that looks a lot like a 2nd edition charac-ter. Layer on a couple different ones (skills and feats) and you’ve got a 3rd edition character. A different combination (skills, feats, and powers) gets you a 4th edition character, and so on. Now that’s an oversimplification, because race and class mean different things in the different editions for starters, but it’s an interesting way to view it. It also brings into focus that at its core, the game has a few vital threads which have changed very little. At its core, a D&D character is still a D&D character, and thus it becomes clear that the very core is the most important part of the game.

Out of BoundsLegends & Lore Archive | 11/15/2011Game design theory is filled with dichotomies. Game versus simulation. Complexity versus simplicity. Sand-box versus storylines. And so on. Among the more interesting, as it pertains to D&D, can be expressed as a simple question with complicated implications:

Does the game present players with challeng-es that have pre-made solutions?

For example, can all monsters be defeated in straight-forward ways, which is to say, attacked with swords and magic missiles until they die? Can all physical obstacles (walls to climb, narrow ledges to traverse, rivers to cross, and so forth) be overcome with die rolls? Are those die rolls achievable given the PCs’ level and abilities? Is the solution to every puzzle

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available to those with the right skills or spells? Is the counter or resolution to every problem hardwired into the game? Put another way, need a player look any further than his character sheet to solve every in-game chal-lenge? Are the bounds of the game defined by the bounds of the rules? Looking back at the game’s roots, the answer to these questions was usually no. In the early days, the game’s mechanics rarely provided solutions to the problems the characters faced. Players stretched beyond the bounds of the rules and looked for solu-tions not covered in the books. Player ingenuity was always the key to winning encounters. And very often, the DM didn’t actually have a set solution in mind ahead of time. He expected the PCs to come up with something on their own. This isn’t true of more recent expressions of the game. There are few encounters that can’t be won simply by using the PCs’ straightforward powers and abilities. For example, consider fire immunity. In older versions of the game, the red dragon was immune to fire. If you’re packing fireballs, you’re just out of luck. In the most recent version of the game, the design-ers decided that it’s no fun if the game tells you that the choices you made were wrong, so red dragons are resistant to fire, but not immune. You can still use your fireballs. That’s a viable design approach. You make sure that no choices are bad choices. You make sure that every lock has a key that can be found. Every barrier has a way past it. You ensure that the PCs are never presented with a challenge that they can’t somehow overcome. You encourage the players to roll some dice and then move on to the next thing. Now imagine a simple dungeon room. There’s a pile of treasure on the far side. The PCs come in and quickly discover that an impenetrable force field blocks the far side of the room from them. In an “old school” dungeon, the players would be forced to

figure out a way to get past the force field or somehow get beyond it to reach the treasure. The DM might have no preset solution in mind. It might very well be impossible for the characters, given their resources, to get the treasure. As the game developed over the years, solutions were inserted into that encounter’s design. Perhaps there’s a lever somewhere else in the dungeon that lowers the field. Maybe a spell or the right combina-tion of spells would bring down the barrier. Perhaps a secret passage circumvents the force field. Or maybe just pounding on it long enough will destroy the barrier. There’s actually a spectrum of different approaches here. For example, if there’s a trick to getting past the force field, that still requires player ingenuity. The encounter gives the characters a safety net but still requires players to do the heavy lifting. The extreme opposite the “old school” approach is where the force field can be overcome by the most straightforward use of almost any character ability: dealing damage, making a skill check, and so on. D&D has historically been a game that challenges both players and their characters. Not every prob-lem is solved by bashing on it. Some problems don’t have solutions at all—unless the players come up with them. If the players know that every challenge they face is going to be solved simply by the most straight-forward application of their abilities, with only the vagaries of the dice being the thing that might actu-ally bring defeat, the game is going to get dull for many players eventually. D&D is as much about accomplishment as it is about storytelling. It’s as much about overcoming obstacles as it is about epic destinies. Deep satisfac-tion comes from coming up with a solution that lies outside the bounds of the rules but is still well within the bounds of the game. And maybe that’s really the takeaway here. The rules are not the sum total of the game. The game is

larger than that. Breaking the rules, circumventing the rules, or ignoring the rules does not take you out of the game. The game encompasses that type of play. It’s built upon it, in fact. So why shouldn’t the design of the game also be bigger than the rules? Why shouldn’t those kind of assumptions be taken into account? It puts the responsibility back in the hands of the players, rather than the DM or the designer. Success or failure lies within their own hands again.

Legends and Lore: A Different Way to Slice the Pie

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A Different Way to Slice the PieLegends & Lore Archive | 11/22/2011When 3rd Edition D&D was released, a lot of people criticized the concept of attacks of opportunity, and the complaints were certainly not without their merits. The irony was that attacks of opportunity existed in the system long before that. In early D&D, if you turned from your melee opponent to run away, he got to make a free attack against you, which is, of course, an attack of opportunity. Also, you couldn’t use a bow or cast a spell if you were standing next to a foe, but there was a common house rule that allowed you to do those things but, again, your opponent would get to attack you. The term “attack of opportunity” wasn’t coined (at least for D&D) until midway through the 2nd Edition of the game, in the Player’s Option books. Codify-ing various exceptional situations into a unified rule seemed to be a great way to organize the material and manage the concept. The problem with a newly codified rule is that it becomes one more thing to remember. Moreover, it becomes a component of the game that you have to learn even though it might never come up in play. As unlikely as it seems, it’s possible in 3rd Edition for one to read and understand the “Attacks of Opportunity” section and then never actually have the rule come into play. Why? Because attacks of opportunity are triggered actions that don’t happen on the player’s turn. They’re also situational and easy to forget. So imagine slicing the pie a different way. Rather than calling out attacks of opportunity as an element of D&D combat, you simply add the rules where and when they are needed. So it would say, as in 1st

Edition, that if you move away from a foe, or use a missile weapon next to him, the foe gets a free attack. With this approach, rules appear only when you need them. There’s less codification and fewer (poten-tially far fewer) rules to master before you can start playing. The rules are revealed on a need-to-know basis, as distinguished from rules that are “unpacked” and individually categorized and described in a large chapter of a rulebook. One advantage to introducing rules when they are needed is that you can keep low-level game play simple. There are many elements of the game that one might argue don’t need to come into play at 1st level, such as damage resistance. It’s a fine mechanic, but at 1st level, you kind of just want to roll dice and see if you hit. If you package damage resistance as a concept only within the situations where it arises (spells, monster descriptions, and so on), and then make sure that these rules situations don’t come into play at low levels, you’re set. Both the new player and

the experienced player who just doesn’t want to deal with a lot of rules can sit down, play a 1st-level char-acter, and never even know that damage resistance (or teleportation, or scrying, or mind control, or grap-pling, or whatever concept you want to label as being unnecessary or overly cumbersome for low-level play) exists. If we adopt this mindset, we can peg an adventure as being 5th level or 12th level or 19th level and have it carry weight not only in terms of character level but also in terms of complexity. If we recognize that the game gets more complex the higher level you go, we can use that to our advantage. A DM browsing through adventures in the store might see that one is for 8th-level characters, and that statement alone tells him not only how tough the challenges are but also how complex the adventure might be in terms of the mechanical intricacy. This way, someone who just wants a simple, faster-moving game can stick to low level, and someone who wants a broader, more com-plex game can play at higher levels. We could even do that for rules supplements, pegging more intricate options as being limited to mid- or high-level play. In the end, with rules packed properly, we can allow game groups to decide how complex they want their game to be, rather than allowing some game designer to do it for them. I don’t want to tell anyone how to play the game. I would prefer to provide ways—perhaps multiple ways—for you to tailor your game to be what you want.

Legends and Lore: What Can You Do?

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What Can You Do?Legends & Lore Archive | 11/29/2011One of the most important aspects of the game doesn’t get a lot of discussion: What can you do on your turn? This is a far more complex question than it sounds. It involves not only how the game organizes action types (action, standard action, move, move action, move equivalent action, minor action, free action, swift action, etc.) but what can be accomplished in a round, and even how long a round lasts. These considerations impact the complexity of the game, the abstractness of the game, and even the speed at which play proceeds around the table. Things got complicated toward the end of 2nd edition and into 3rd edition when everything got cod-ified. Funny how that works. But it’s true, at least from a certain point of view. Breaking things down in a concrete manner makes things more manageable but also takes away from the f luidity of a more general system. In 3rd edition, the round got significantly shorter (one minute to six seconds, although in various alter-nate rules versions the round was already short). This reduced the abstraction of the game, as it allowed each stated action by a player to be directly repre-sented in the game. If a player said he was making an attack, that’s what his character did. In earlier edi-tions, with a one minute round, it was just the most significant thing he did in a longer, more abstract period of time. Such abstraction also covered up problems, as the DM had more f lexibility within that larger timeframe to hand wave away troublesome issues. It also resulted in likely more realistic total

combat lengths, with typical fights lasting a few min-utes as opposed to a few seconds. Although they handle it somewhat differently, both 3rd edition and 4th edition break the round (or rather, what one character can do on his turn within a round) down into a big action and a small action. You do something and you move, or you do something and then do something else that the designers have equated to a move, plus some number of free actions. How much simpler it would be if you just did one thing on your turn. If things worked that way, there would be no need to categorize actions. You would attack or move or cast a spell. The game could then be generous with stuff that “didn’t count,” like drawing a weapon or item, opening a door, and so on. Rounds would likely cycle faster as people moved through their turns faster. Not only would each player be doing less, but more importantly, you wouldn’t have players searching for extra actions to squeeze every last bit of value out of their turn. This kind of simpli-fication breaks with game history, so older players might balk. But to a new player, the statement “you can do one action on your turn” makes a lot of sense. And it makes individual turns shorter and faster. With the “you can do one action on your turn” approach, some players would feel like they wasted their turn if they didn’t do something significant like make an attack or cast a spell. People wouldn’t want to move or do anything else. This, however, would be less true if play moved a lot faster. In later edi-tions of the game, a combat round might take twenty minutes to resolve, and so if all you did was move around, that’s not a lot of fun. If you cut that down to just a couple of minutes or less, however, then it’s not that big a deal. I think there’s something to be said for doing less more often than doing a lot of different things on your turn but only getting a few turns. If rounds move a lot faster, the impact of having something happen to you that takes you out of the game for a round or two (stun or hold, for example) is

greatly lessened—not so much from a character point of view, but from a player point of view. Faster play engages players in the game, because there is less time spent waiting for one’s turn. However, this one change isn’t probably going to speed up play enough to make the kind of dramatic difference I’m talking about. If readers find this line of investigation inter-esting, I’ll discuss other possibilities to speeding up play in future columns. Let me know.

Legends and Lore: The Temperature of the Rules

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The Temperature of the RulesLegends & Lore Archive | 12/6/2011I was chatting with Mike Mearls about thermostats. Mike said that he wanted a book describing a thermo-stat to state, “The temperature is set at 70 degrees. If you want it warmer or cooler, here’s how you adjust the temperature.” I said that I would want the book to state, “You can set the temperature to anything you want, and here’s how. If you do nothing, the default setting is 70 degrees.” Okay. So we weren’t actually talking about ther-mostats. Or rather, our discussion about thermostats was actually a metaphor for how to present informa-tion to a DM. The “temperature,” in this case, is rules implementation, and the adjustments represent the ability of the DM to alter things as he or she sees fit, based on the situation. But the crux of the discussion wasn’t around the ability of the DM to be final arbiter. We both agreed that should be the case. The discussion, rather, was about the default assumption of the game: do you tell the DM how to adjust the temperature from the start, or do you tell him to set the thermostat to 70, and then if he doesn’t like that, to adjust it from there? In other words, do you give the DM a rule and then give him permission (and guidance) to break if necessary, or do you assume the DM will make adjustments from the get-go? Last week, I wrote about what you can do in a round. Pretend for a moment that you played in a game where you could do one thing and move your speed on your turn. So you could move and attack, move and cast a spell, or move and do some other action. That’s straightforward and requires no DM adjudication. It’s not until less common actions, such

as opening a door, come into play. One approach would be to give a rule specifying whether opening a door counted as an action, something you could do instead of moving, or if it just didn’t count as an action at all, but then tell the DM that he can vary that rule based on the situation. The other approach would be give the DM a lengthy bit of guidance on how to adjudicate what can be done in a round based on cir-cumstances, with lots of basic examples. Both approaches have merit. The first approach gives the DM clear direction and adds more concrete definition to the game. The other puts more power into the DM’s hands immediately. Since the launch of 3rd edition and continuing on into 4th edition, the game has focused more on pro-viding rules directly and overtly. This approach also made it easier to adjudicate situations that the rules

didn’t cover explicitly. Prior to 3rd edition, however, “the DM decides” wasn’t just a fallback position; it often was the rule. This sometimes cultivated the per-ception that if a DM makes a call that goes contrary to the rules then he’s doing something wrong. And of course, there’s a tendency for rules-lawyer players to challenge or at least question such rulings. If you give a concrete rule for most every situation, the game becomes easier to DM insofar as you rarely have to make a decision or create a ruling on the f ly (which can be difficult). If the rule is printed in a book, it’s easier to assume that it’s balanced and con-sistent, and players are less likely to question it. On the other hand, if you take the time instead to teach DMs how to make fair, intelligent, and consistent decisions and rulings on the f ly, you make it easier to DM because there’s less referring to the rules in

Legends and Lore: Maintaining the Machine

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the books. Nothing makes a game move faster than a DM who is empowered and able to make wise rulings whenever situations arise. Empowering DMs from the start facilitates simu-lation. No set of rules can cover every situation, and the DM can address fine details in a way no rulebook can. When it comes to how much of your turn is spent opening a door, perhaps it depends on the door. A large, heavy metal door might be your action to open, while opening a simple wooden door might not be an action at all. Another door might fall in between. Do you want the rules to try to cover every aspect of this relatively insignificant situation? Fewer rules coupled with DM empowerment also facilitate story-focused play, because nothing slows down an exciting narrative like consulting a book or two . . . or ten. Giving the DM the ability to adjudicate what you can and can’t do on your turn then players to be more freeform with their actions. They don’t need to worry about action types and can just state what they want to do. A player’s crazy plan might not fit into the tightly defined rules for what you can do in a round, but a good DM can quickly determine on the f ly if it sounds reasonable and keep the story and action moving. DMs need to be able to run the game, but is their right to override the rules “Plan B” or “Plan A”? Is DM adjudication breaking the rules, or is it in fact the rule itself?

Maintaining the MachineLegends & Lore Archive | 12/13/2011Last week’s column on presenting information to the DM raises an interesting question: What’s the Dun-geon Master’s real role? I’ve asked people that before, and to my dismay, I sometimes get back answers like, “He rolls for the monsters.” I say “dismay” because the DM is so much more than that. Others would argue that the DM’s role is to act as a sort of mechanic, tending to the machinery of the game. The game system codifies and systematizes so much that there is little need for adjudication on the DM’s part, only the occasional interpretation. This has been true for so long that the D&D culture has changed slightly, to the point where many think of DM arbitration as a bad thing. If the DM needs to make a judgment call, either something has gone ter-ribly wrong with the game or the DM is overstepping his bounds. Still others might claim that the DM is a story-teller. While being a Dungeon Master is a wildly creative enterprise, the idea of “DM as storyteller” gives me pause because, in truth, the entire group is the storyteller. The DM creates a world and char-acters and plots, but the story doesn’t get told until everyone at the table gets involved. I’ve always liked to look at the DM as the conduit between the players and the fantasy world. He is their eyes and ears, describing what they see, and he is the arbiter of what they can and cannot do to affect the (unreal) world around them. Maybe the DM is all of these things. But what if we looked at the DM and the game as partners in joint enterprise? What if we recognized that each has strengths and weaknesses and created

a relationship to capitalize on their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses? For example, the game system can’t possibly cover every potential action that a character will take in a game. Thus, the game system is a poor arbiter of how long it takes to do things in a round. It can provide rules for common actions (attacking, casting a spell, and so forth), but the system can’t provide concrete arbitration for every action. The DM can. It’s not hard at all, because the DM is a human being and can easily judge how long actions take. It’s also an aspect of the game that doesn’t demand absolute precision. So in this case, a DM’s judgment call is fine. In fact, it’s a strength. Now consider attack rolls. Most DMs are not combat trained and probably don’t know a lot about weapons, fighting styles, and so on. The rules, how-ever, handle combat capably and with enough precision for the game’s balance to remain intact. Why not give the DM the power (and guidelines) to adjudicate actions on a turn, and let the game system handle attack rolls? The game is filled with things that the DM can do better than the rules, and

Legends and Lore: Nod to Realism

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the rules can do better than the DM. Figuring them out can be tricky, but it’s an interesting approach to system design. I like it because it embraces what I think is a strength—maybe the primary strength—of tabletop RPGs: the existence of a living, breathing human at the table and not just a rulebook or com-puter. Since we’ve got the DM there, let’s put him to work. Which is to say, let’s get him to do what he does best and make sure that the game itself takes care of all the stuff that’s hard, time consuming, or tedious for a DM. Embracing what it means to really be a DM is a way to ensure that it remains a fun and rewarding task.

Nod to RealismLegends & Lore Archive | 12/20/2011Many people look at Dungeons & Dragons as a simulation. Certainly, the roots of the game lie in simulation. The game distinguishes between the damage a sword does from a spear, for example. In various incarnations, it has tried to distinguish the speed of a warhorse from a riding horse, describe how long it would take to dig out a 10 by 10 room filled with rubble, and calculate how often an intel-ligent foe strikes at a foe’s head as opposed to the rest of his body. But when people talk about “realism” in D&D, I always mentally put those quotation marks around the word, because ultimately, D&D isn’t very realistic. Instead, when possible, it makes attempts at pleasing people interested in realistic simulation without slowing down the game or making things too cumbersome. (It has, at times, failed at this, but it’s succeeded far more often.) These occasional attempts are usually referred to as “nods to realism.” I’ve been thinking about that, and really, that phrase sums up the entire game pretty well. The game is a heavy helping of fantasy that also offers a nod to realism. Growing out of historical wargames, with their heavy dose of simu-lation, the game layered in a great deal of magic, monsters, and other fantasy elements. But even then, it retained a lot of historical “realism.” With the tran-sition from OD&D, the nods to realism increased. We got detailed lists of polearm types, diseases, and even government types for Dungeon Masters to use while building their campaign worlds. Not to men-tion weapon speed factors and the “Weapon versus Armor” table. From that point on, the levels of simula-tion rose and fell as the game developed, but there’s no denying that a nod to realism is clearly something that a significant number of players over the years

have felt was important. But how much realism is too much? How much is enough? It might be an even more complex question than just that. Take, for example, hit points. The concept of hit points has remained more or less constant throughout the life of the game. It’s a key element—certainly something that makes D&D the game that it is and always has been. At various times, the game has tried to provide explanations for what hit points represented and why characters gain more as they gain experience, and why a 10th-level fighter can jump off a 50-foot-high ledge and survive while a 1st-level character could not. Over the years, players have developed their own justifications that suit their own views of the game and the extent to which fantasy intrudes upon reality and vice versa (and the players who don’t care about such things have ignored it, by and large).

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Perhaps the fact that individual players come up with their own justifications—their own nods to realism—is in fact the very strength of the concept. You and I might look at hit points differently (and in fact, you might care about the explanation a lot, while it might not matter to me at all), and that’s OK. Because the game doesn’t get too far into the realm of simulation with a system that forces people to suffer penalties from broken bones and track every little bruise, it remains f lexible enough to encompass both your explanation for hit points and my lack of one. All of this means that designing for D&D is tricky when it comes to determining the extent to which simulation hurts game play. There’s the nod to real-ity that the game provides, and then there’s providing room for the players’ own nods. Understanding where the current audience (as opposed to say, the 1974 audience, or the 2000 audi-ence) stands when it comes to how much of a nod to reality is enough is something that’s really important to me. I hope you’ll answer this week’s poll questions and let me know.

About the AuthorsMike Mearls is the D&D Group Manager at Wizards of the Coast LLC and co-authored several 4th Edition D&D proj-ects, including Player’s Option: Heroes of Shadow™ and Player’s Handbook 3.

Monte Cook is a freelance game designer who began his career at Iron Crown Enterprises and TSR, Inc. before joining Wizards of the Coast in 1997, where he became one of the co-designers of the D&D 3rd Edition core rulebooks. After leaving Wizards of the Coast, he founded Malhavoc Press and continued to writer and publish d20 RPG products.

EditorsBart Carroll, Christopher Perkins

ProducersChristopher Perkins, Greg Bilsland, Stan!

Graphic ProductionErin Dorries