dnd

After Geek Girl Con, I spent a week hanging out with my friends in Seattle and was able to get in 3 games while out there, The One Ring, 4e, and Pathfinder. Both The One Ring and Pathfinder games had a higher danger threshold than the 4e game and most of the 4e games I've been in in general. In particular, both had their share of save rolls. I know this is something that used to be a bigger part of D&D but my experiences over the week left me feeling a bit mixed on them.

The One Ring

In The One Ring, I played a wood elf. We were chasing down some dwarves and the trail led to a pool's edge where the tracks mysteriously stopped. A bell began to ring and my character fell victim to its enchantments. Down into the pool she went.

This is the first time I've played a character that was compelled to do something. Since this was a one shot for me and I trust the GM completely (Hi Chris!), it really wasn't a big deal. Out into the hallway we went and he quickly described what was happening. I had a few choices to make, do I wait for my party (not knowing if they would come rescue me, I was a new character after all)? Do I try to swim out of there the way I came in? Or do I open the dark door I found down there? None of these choices are an obvious "right" choice but at least the one I chose, wait for the rest of the party, wasn't an instant death sentence, although some of the players in the room thought my character might be dead already.

Now, if my failed save had led to instant character death, I'm not sure how happy I would have been. I mean, there are times where I wouldn't really care and sometimes games with instant death can be fun. A fair number of video games have that type of behavior, where the fun of the game is more in mastering it than playing through an awesome story. But in this case, there wasn't anything that was obvious to me about what I should do. It would have felt arbitrary and unfulfilling. I guess what I mean is that the setback was nice, but being able to recover from it, even if it meant fighting more monsters, was even better.

Pathfinder

My host Stephen was nice enough to run a Pathfinder dungeon crawl/delve for me during my stay at his house. While I hadn't played Pathfinder before, I had been in a few sessions of a 3/3.5 house-ruled game. However, my character really hadn't had to deal with many save situations and definitely none that involved conditions like paralysis or blindness. The Fellowship of the Tweet had dealt with paralysis (and my cleric's inability to Turn Undead versus some ghouls) but I'm still a little scarred by that encounter.

If I'm being honest, I found the save situations in that game a bit more frustrating. Our barbarian became blinded for an hour after he failed his saving throw versus the blindheim and another character got sucked into a gelatinous cube at one point. While I think I can see what the mechanics were trying to model/accomplish and there is nothing inherently wrong about them, they just aren't my preferred way of doing it.

That said, I did see how they encouraged more creative play (although it's not the first time I've noticed it). Particularly in the case of the blindheim, where you have some options to overcome its gaze attack (which in 4e terms can be used both as an aura and as a ranged at-will). Although the dice weren't in my favor, Stephen said yes to my idea of trying to cover the blindheim's eyes with my cloak, which would have helped my party kill it faster.

I wouldn't mind making it clearer in 4e that DMs could allow creative solutions like that in their games, perhaps even in the monster's statblock. We already have this to a degree. For instance, the wraith loses its insubstantial trait until the start of its next turn whenever it takes radiant damage. This might encourage a divine character to choose a less powerful attack with the radiant keyword to give the party a better chance of hitting and killing the creature. However, we could expand this even more and make it more like a trap or hazard where the PCs can take countermeasures to avoid a particularly damaging attack or stop a buff. Spend a standard action and one part of the monster's special powers goes away for a turn.

This might also give space for the people who like to play helper characters. Instead of making certain classes be helpers, individual players can decide how to play out those classes. And while not everyone can necessarily help with every monster, helping isn't limited to a particular class type. This might be more fun and rewarding than the existing aid another rules.

So how would this work? Let's take the blindheim as an example. In 4e, I would make its gaze attack into an aura. Entering or starting your turn in the aura causes you to grant combat advantage and provides a -2 to attack rolls since the creature's gaze is so distracting. If you end the turn in the aura, you have to make a saving throw against becoming blind. (Alternatively, we could do this when you start or enter, with a successful saving throw meaning you grant CA and have the -2 penalty instead of being blinded.)

Since Gaze attacks can't be done while the creature is blinded, players could find ways to blind the creature. Perhaps they have a power that causes blindness or they decide to put a cloth over the creature's eyes. The type of action required (standard or minor) should be determined by the benefit they gain from the action. In the terms of this aura, I'd say they were gaining a pretty big benefit on success, and would require a standard action, since not only would they as an individual benefit but the whole party as well.

What Do You Think?

So, let's say you were faced with a creature like the blindheim. How would you overcome its special powers? How far can we push this while still keeping the rules fairly light? Would you allow someone to spend their standard action, no check, to try to blind the blindheim?

It's easy to dismiss concerns or criticism about rules changes, proposed or implemented, as being a grognard, especially in D&D. "You don't like it because it's different," they'll say, "but you'll just buy it in the end." But my understanding is that with the current state of things, and particular with the Legends & Lore articles, we're supposed to talk about it. It's their way of getting community feedback, good or bad, on what they are working on.

Now I reacted pretty strongly to the most recent Legends & Lore article, Magic and Mystery. Twitter can be great about many things but a nuanced discussion of the issues is often difficult in the space of 140 or so characters, especially when having a discussion with particular people, meaning you have to put their twitter handles in with whatever you're trying to say.

So, now that I have a bit more room, let me first say that I'm in favor of the idea of removing magic items from character advancement. I fully acknowledge that the 4e system made it more difficult to run particular types of campaigns. It's also an issue I've discussed before. I love the inherent bonus system, although it doesn't fix this completely, and just felt we needed more guidance on how to use it properly. I also love the new rarity system on magic items to give a DM guidelines about what might be available and what might not be. Again, it's not perfect, but it does attempt to address some of the issues with the current magic system.

However, whatever rule system we put in place, I would love it if more guidance was provided, especially for newer DMs. When I started DMing, I didn't realize that the 4e system required magic items as part of advancement. Given the story and the group, this meant I didn't hand out as many magic items as I should have. While we didn't advance far enough for this problem to become apparent, it wasn't a big deal. But it would have been nice if things were stated a bit more explicitly.

So, it's not the suggested rule change that made me react strongly. I'm in favor, and have been in favor of it for over a year. It's the larger context of the article that made me wonder if I was being trolled by a well-known and well-loved D&D designer and whether or not I should continue to read the articles.

Instead of laying out the issues, the article states that players want a particular type of magic experience from D&D, one in which magic is mysterious. It then goes on to propose that the reason magic is no longer mysterious is that items can no longer do wild and crazy things, in part because they are part of character advancement and also because they are available to players in the form of lists.

Missing from the discussion are the reasons why the system evolved that way. Prior editions where magic wasn't as well codified as 4e had their issues as well. DMs, maybe as a way to bribe their players or under the mistaken impression that adding more cool factor always makes games cooler, frequently gave more magic items than they really should have. They then would try to take those items away from the players, who by that point, thought the DM was playing with them. Trust eroded and the game would become less fun. I personally know of one group that TPK'ed their characters because the game ceased to be fun. (See Monty Haul)

In addition, the old way required DMs to know about the magic items available and put pressure on them to keep up with the books. One of the things I loved about 4e is that each player could tell me what he or she might like and I could keep an eye out for the items that I thought they might want to have. I didn't invest in the Adventurer's Vault series because as a DM, I had enough other stuff to do. I don't want to spend my valuable planning time keeping up with every magic item out there. I just don't. It doesn't mean other DMs don't enjoy it. It just means that there are arguments for allowing players to know what magic items exist and that there isn't one default experience or desire in this area.

Furthermore, there are other just as likely reasons why magic is no longer mysterious that are never explored in the article. After 30 years of playing with magic getting by and large the same treatment, how can it be mysterious for that player? Who is to say that it's not mysterious to the new player who came to the game for the first time within the past two or three years. Maybe there are parts of the magic system that we want to be mysterious and crazy, like the aftereffects of the spell plague in the Forgotten Realms or an artifact lost to the world for thousands of years, but other items, like common spells and prayers should be, well, known.

Rather than seduce us with nostalgia or bash on players for, gods forbid, salivating over an item that perfectly fits their character concept, perhaps we should explore these issues. Also, I find it a bit difficult to talk about solutions to the magic problem only with people who primarily DM. Regardless of which book the magic items end up in, they will have to know about them in the sort of intimate detail that makes mysterious harder if not impossible. Anyway, that's where I'm coming from.

"Where do you see your character in 5 levels?"

Early in my experience with D&D, I tried out a 3.x D&D game my friend was in. My friend and I were trying to create my character when he asked that question. I had no idea how to answer it. I barely knew anything about the classes, or well, the system, as it was; I just wanted to play a game, but doing that seemed to require a fair amount of system knowledge. If you don't necessarily see the relative importance of the choices between characters at level 1, how are you supposed to know where you want to be at level 5?

I prefer it when a system can make a lot of these thoughts disappear for newer players while not erasing them fully for experienced players. This is one of the things I love about Ascension, especially the digital version. In my experience, the game grows with you. The game play itself, along with the randomization, helps narrow your focus and your choices, making the game less overwhelming to a newcomer. As you learn the rules, the different strategies surface as a natural part of the game.

Ascension's victory condition is pretty simple. The player with the most honor at the end of the game wins. The most obvious way to gain honor is by defeating monsters. Heroes and constructs can provide honor during the game as well. Honor gained as the result of game play comes from the shared pool and when the pool reaches zero, the game ends at the end of that round. Most heroes and constructs have an honor value that gets added to the player's total at the end of the game. So both how much honor you gain as a result of game play and how much you collect by building your deck matters.

On your first turn, you have 5 hero cards, all of them give you +1 to one of two resources, runes or power. You use the runes to buy heroes or constructs and you use power to defeat monsters. The center row has 6 random cards, each representing one of those 3 sub-types. Whether or not you can buy or defeat any of those middle row cards depends on their cost compared to your resources for the turn. In addition, there are 3 cards in the upper left that are always available to you, a hero that gives you +2 to runes, a hero that gives you +2 to power, and a monster that gives you +1 to honor.

The digital version highlights the cards that are available to you given your resources. I haven't done the math, but it feels like you often only have to choose between 2-5 options each turn. Just as important, the 3 permanent options in the upper left means you can always do something each turn. The limited options along with the randomization means as a new player, you don't have to worry about all of the strategies for success. You can have a satisfactory game, in my opinion, by making the best decision given what you have before you and you still have a chance at winning the game.

The more I played, the more I saw how certain decisions might build upon one another. Cards bought early in the game can have bigger effects on game play than cards bought later in the game. So as the honor pool decreases, my buying strategy often changes to cards with more honor. Unless I have certain constructs in play, such as the one that puts mechana constructs into play when you acquire them, I don't emphasize constructs over heroes. (By the way, that one combined with the one that treats all constructs as if they were mechana creates a bad ass combo.) There are a bunch of these strategies for a player to discover as he gains more experience.

I like this style of learning in games and would love to bring it to D&D. There's an argument that early D&D games did this, particularly with random ability rolls and frequent character death. The current emphasis on long character arcs, often across 3 tiers and 30 levels of adventures makes it harder to experiment with characters and means players have fewer opportunities to try out different styles of play. This means decisions made early in play are built upon and magnified in later levels, especially in 4e where multi-classing and hybrid classes aren't as robust as they could be. However, the ability in earlier editions, such as 3.5, to gain levels in a different class doesn't necessarily help, since those classes often don't interact with one another. Since the systems assume you will make certain decisions to keep up with the system's math, even new players feel a pressure to know where their character will be in 5 levels when, in my opinion, they should be experimenting with the system to learn how the various bits interact.

I think there are ways to bring this to 4e. I'll write about this more tomorrow, but currently I'm thinking about combining aspects of D&D Encounters, Lair Assault, and Phil "The Chatty DM" Menard's Level 0 rules.

Over the weekend I posted an article showing the skill distribution for the two Essentials players books. I added some quick analysis along with a statement that I intended to delve a bit deeper. Today I'd like to discuss why I think the current skills system leads people to be optimizers.

The Core Mechanic Encourages Optimization

In 4e, the books describe the core mechanic of the game, "the most important rule," as the following:

1. Roll a d20. You want to roll high!
2. Add all relevant modifiers.
3. Compare the total to a target number. If your result equals or exceeds the target number, the check is a success. Otherwise, it's a failure.

When I run games for new players, I'm told to explain this core mechanic. It explicitly sets up a situation where there is a binary success/failure and where players will feel the need to optimize. While there are always exceptions, such as DM-given bonuses for roleplaying, regardless of the table you play at, this is the assumed base experience.

So, if that informs the base of what you know about the game, it's reasonable to assume that a player likely will pick skills that align with the character's better abilities, the ones that give the largest bonus, especially when he or she has no idea how those skills might be used in the game itself. After all, what's important is that we roll high.

I'm a Star at Something, Right?

Even if that wasn't the core mechanic, I don't think it's particularly radical to suggest that people who sit down for the first time might pick skills based on what their character is innately good at. When I started out, I had no idea if history was going to be more useful to me than bluff (not that I necessarily had access to both of those skills), but I did know what my character was likely to be good at and just said she was also likely to be interested in learning more about those things. Also, it seems typical that players might want to differentiate their characters in a particular area. We're playing heroes after all. For instance:

• "Thadeous has the gift of a silver tongue and the personality to milk it for all its worth." (Diplomacy)
• "Serena's parents love to tell the story of how she walked across the laundry line to visit her friend at age 3. They knew she was a natural for the royal circus." (Acrobatics)

If everyone in a hero groups has basically the same set of skills and about the same abilities in them, what makes them unique? What would Leverage look like if all five of them were hitters? What would the Fellowship of the Ring look like if they were all wizards or rangers? Furthermore, if we are to have class skill lists, they should make it easier, not harder, to create a hero. Why auto-assign certain skills if the class isn't particularly good at the related ability, as in the case of the warpriest? But if we look at those distributions, we can see that by design it's harder to do that for some classes.

How Might Word-Based Ranks Help?

This natural inclination towards optimization, reinforced by the core mechanic, is one of the biggest reasons I like the idea of moving to word based ranks for skills. I personally would love to get away from worrying about +2 bonuses here and -1 penalties there. In my opinion, they often clutter our feat and magic item lists with these small opportunities to move the needle in one direction or the other for too small of an overall gain. Small increases in attack precision make a lot more sense given the small differences in defenses between levels. I don't think the same is true with skills. I'm not sure about the rest of the rules in that column, such as when you may roll, but I think that's a better discussion for later.

When Might Skill Clumping Be Counter-Productive?

Unlike combat, the roleplaying portion of 4e doesn't provide a way of moving the spotlight from player to player. Trying to enforce an initiative-order like system on this part of the game can make the story stilted and unnatural. In my experience, the lack of tools for moving the spotlight around makes it very easy for a player to fall out of the game during role-playing and skill challenges, especially shy or reserved players. If a character doesn't have a special skill to contribute, I think this makes it even more likely that unless the player has an internal reason for wanting to be part of it, such as enjoying play-acting or storytelling, the player will tune out. This isn't necessarily bad, not everyone enjoys this part of the game, but I think the current skills distribution can lead to this behavior in players who might otherwise enjoy role playing. As with just about anything, DM skill can overcome this.

In addition, just like certain damage keywords, some skills are more valuable than others. While this will vary from group to group, in general, heavy use of acrobatics, bluff, thievery and streetwise in skill challenges, traps, and other skill rolls may cause the spotlight to shine much more often on certain players versus others.

When Might Skill Clumping be Productive?

For some skills, we might want a number of characters competent in them. For tasks that come up often in the game, but not in a way that really spotlight's a particular character's talents, we might want a number of the people in the party to use the same skill. Perhaps they are trying to convince the hermit wizard that they aren't going to run off with his expensive magic item that will be useful in tracking down the evil goblin king who is attacking the town.

Some Ideas to Help

I've written a fair bit already, but I want to point out some tools that can help. I will write more in the future about this.

Scenes

What some games do to move the spotlight around is to break the game down into scenes and having each scene have a subset of the characters present. For some groups, we could have multiple scenes taking place across the city at the same time. Perhaps one team is off trying to pass off a forged letter while another is gathering information in a bar. Even within one room we could have multiple scenes going. Perhaps a grate high up in the wall could provide the group with information of what's in the next room while another group could be investigating some runes on the floor.

The emphasis should be that the people in a particular scene should rely on their own skills and the skills used should be driven by role play. Yes, this can mean splitting the party during these parts of the game. If you keep each scene short and provide easy ways for the characters to escape any combat, this should be fine.

Non-binary Checks

Not all checks need to be binary in nature. The result doesn't have to indicate success or failure. Instead, it could represent degree of success. Let's say you're in a treasure room when someone, I'm not going to name names Mr McStealy, triggers a trap that causes the ceiling to begin descent. The DM can ask you to make a check to see how much treasure you escape with and the number you roll indicates the amount of success. Everyone will want to make this check regardless of their modifier. It's fun and we get to roll some dice. Not all non-binary checks need to be fun but they need to mean something to the players and/or their characters.

Ok, more later. But for now, I have to get some food. :)