What works in D&D - part 4

So we've looked, separately, at some interesting elements I think make D&D "work": a solid baseline, an experience point system that rewards play beyond the realm of combat, and an achievable "end game". As most of folks reading this particular blog will already know, the gradual erosion of these elements over the later editions of the game led some to keep playing, or return to, the older editions, or produce retroclones or variant d20-based games like BasicFantasy RPG and C&C.

An interesting alternative to that mindset was proposed, back in 2007, called E6. What this did, in a nutshell, was to take the existing 3x rules and pull them in nice and close to the baseline - characters topped out at 6th level and gained only feats from then on. This had a neat effect on the assumed universe of an E6 campaign; everything was at a power level much closer to what we would think of as "normal" in a sword & sorcery setting - the scary monsters like dragons and giants stayed scary rather than becoming mere stepping stones to get at challenges of an ever increasing power level ("Epic!"). This approach holds a lot of appeal to me - it acknowledges the strengths of a later ruleset (which I think we in the old-school community are often too reticent to do) while finding a clever and effective way to reign in the obvious problems with that ruleset. It neatly recreates a more traditional rpg experience by having a period of dungeon crawling followed by a period in which more high-concept campaigning will come into play.

But, I would be remiss if I concentrated solely on rules when it comes to "what works in D&D". As the revolving door of editions spins increasingly faster, something extremely important tends to get forgotten. If you've been following the whirlwind of 5E newsbites, you've probably noticed some familiar names keep getting mentioned: "Keep on the Borderlands", "Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth", "Tomb of Horrors", and so on.

Yes, I'm talking about Adventures!

One of the biggest things that is simply missing, from late 2E on up, is memorable adventures - the kind that everyone you know who plays D&D has played, the kind that becomes a part of the whole gaming vernacular and a measuring stick to gauge other adventures by. Since WotC's acquisition of the brand, only three titles come to mind as having any lasting impact on the collective mind of the gaming community (Sunless Citadel, Red Hand of Doom, and Keep on the Shadowfells), which over a course of 10 years is a stunning failure. The best adventures have a way of making players not care a whit what ruleset they are using. Companies like Necromancer Games, Goodman Games, and Paizo were able to step into this gigantic hole left by the game's official publisher, and build a nice business around giving folks what they needed - great adventures. While many like to blame 4E's perceived failure on its rules, I tend to lay the blame equally on the fact that WotC didn't pursue an aggressive publishing schedule of consistently engaging adventures, and at the same time refused to add their new ruleset to the open license that enabled third parties to produce adventures to go along with it.

As 5E begins its open playtest (you can sign up for this here, btw) in a couple of months, I am hoping that the discussion of rules does not completely crowd out a discussion on what players will get to do with these rules - will there be a renewed emphasis on adventures?

SOPA

Wikipedia and other sites are blacking out today.

Why?

Because if SOPA passes, any complaint of copyright infringement (and yes, I said "complaint", not "violation", much less "proven violation") means your site gets shut down, no questions asked, until you feed enough money into the legal system to maybe be allowed to speak again some day.

Can anyone think of any particular niche genre of adventure games fan sites that might be easy prey for such a witch hunt? Hmmm? Yes, the OSR will be SOPA's bitch-boy, no free cigarettes or lube recquired.

As per Wikipedia:

"Call your elected officials.

Tell them you are their constituent, and you oppose SOPA and PIPA.

Why?

SOPA and PIPA put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

In a world in which politicians regulate the Internet based on the influence of big money, Wikipedia — and sites like it — cannot survive.

Congress says it's trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the "cure" that SOPA and PIPA represent is worse than the disease. SOPA and PIPA are not the answer: they will fatally damage the free and open Internet."

What works in D&D - part 3

Just as older editions of D&D had a firmer baseline, they also had a more defined cap. I hate to use the word "cap", because its not exactly true, but the way the experience point system is set up, there is a point when character development stops having such an emphasis on leveling up, and more of an emphasis on how the character influences the game world (we'll call it a "soft cap"). There comes a point, typically between 200k-400k xp, when a character reaches "Name" level. The actual level may vary (9-12) but this is when a character stops rolling Hit Dice, and is presumed to have reached the upper limits of power, with further advancement being a lot more incremental in terms of hit points and armor class. From this point, goals become more obscure and narrative-driven - establishing and maintaining strongholds, attracting followers, carving demesnes from the wilderness, researching more obscure and powerful spells, and so on.

This could also be seen as a time to let those name-level characters essentially retire, fading into the background of campaign setting politics and such, letting players start new characters and reserve those high level PCs for only the most earthshaking missions. In a way, successful players "win" the game by getting to this point, or by tapping some later resources to poke a finger into the strange waters of attaining demi-god or "immortal" status.

Later editions would remove the "soft cap" of 10th level and push it up to 20th (or 30th in "epic" play). To facilitate that, the options of the game would have to get so far from the baseline as to become nearly comedic. Where once an armor class of "0" (or 20 in ascending terms) was a watermark only breached by the toughest dragons (or high-dex elves in magical plate mail), armor classes in the 40's (or -20's in descending terms) had to become commonplace. To challenge a party of say, 18th level characters, who are now presumed to continue regular dungeon crawling, you have to have dozens and dozens of extremely powerful (yet mundane and common) monsters to stock those dungeons, begging the question of how any lowly orcs, beggars, or 10th level paladins for that matter, can even exist in this nightmarish apocalyptic world.

In case the implications of the removal of the soft cap are not immediately obvious, this basically means that, no matter how powerful your character gets, there will always be a multitude of more powerful foes out there. Not one or two, mister 12th level ranger, but hordes of stuff designed to make much higher level characters wet their pants. In eight years of running and playing 3x, this seemed to convey to the players and DMs (in my experience at least) a growing feeling of "nothing's ever good enough". There was no built in mechanism like Name Level to attain, no gradual high-level power curve to ride gracefully into a well-deserved retirement and notorious spot in tavern tales and the epic poetry touted across the realms by any bard worth his salt.

The term "grind" is one often used to describe later edition combat - hours of PC bonuses and modifiers striving against heaps of monster hit points and star-trek-spaceship-force-field-level armor classes until one emerges the statistical victor. But its not too much of a leap to describe an entire 20 or 30 level 3x or later campaign as a grind - when does it all end? In my experience, these campaigns ended when everyone got fed up with the needless complexity of high-level play.

If I had to pick the best publisher of contemporary edition adventures out there right now, I'd pick Paizo, hands down. Their Adventure Paths are consistently well-thought out, entertaining, with high production values and interesting plots that make you not mind the odd railroad car so much. Yet, scanning message boards out there, you will find a whole lot more "just started Adventure Path X!" threads than you will "Just finished Adventure Path X!". Actually, I couldn't find any of the latter, but I'm assuming there must be some, just harder to find maybe. What do you do when the rules themselves are the biggest challenge to overcome for even the best adventures?

To be continued...

What works in D&D (continued)

The next item I'd like to cover is experience.

The experience point system is something I think had a greater effect on the play style of older editions than is immediately obvious. Not only did it emphasize a different type of adventuring than newer editions did, it also had a built in balancing effect.

In older editions, experience points were awarded primarily for the successful acquisition of treasure and, to a much lesser extent, defeating monsters. For example, a group of 6 orcs might be in possession of a gem worth 500gp. In terms of experience points, this would, altogether, net the party about 590xp; 500 for the gem and 15 or so apiece for the orcs.

That's a huge difference there, the gem is obviously worth a whole lot more to the party than killing the orcs would be. Effectively, it changes the whole goal of the encounter - simply fighting with and defeating the orcs is not the point, getting that expensive gem is the point, the gem is what allows the party to increase in power, and gives them funds to spend on carousing and training. Killing the orcs may simply not be worth the risk of getting killed.

Realizing this suddenly opens up a world of new options to the players - getting that gem by guile, stealth, or cunning may be safer and even easier than going toe-to-toe with the orcs.

This sort of experience system became another baseline of older edition games - this was a game of exploration and player skill as much as, if not more than, it was about kicking in doors and killing orcs. And yet again, future editions would erode this core concept.

Beginning with 3E, a new experience point system was introduced. It was mathematically coherent, followed a progression, a formula, and would largely turn the game into Fantasy Fight Club. Experience from this point on was awarded almost exclusively for killing monsters. Now, the encounter with the six orcs holding a 500gp gem was worth 900xp, 900 for the orcs, and butkis for the gem. Getting the gem through guile, stealth, or cunning now had absolutely no effect on advancing your character's abilities - killing orcs is what makes you level up.

There is a "story" xp award for 3e, by the way, but it was largely small and arbitrary, and did little that I could tell to emphasize exploration (or even story) over combat.

Experience also had an effect on how characters progressed. In older editions, the experience total needed to advance a level basically doubled at each level - for example a class might need 2000xp to advance to 2nd level, 4000xp for 3rd, 8000xp for 4th, and so on. An interesting effect this system had was that, if a player lost a PC, their new character was likely to "catch up" with the group fairly quickly even starting all over at 1st level. While those surviving fourth level characters need 8k over the next few adventures to level up, the new 1st level character can use his 8k share of those adventures to advance all the way up to 4th (provided he survives, which is much easier to do in an exploratory game than a combat game).

3E introduced a more algorithmic advancement - characters needed 1000xp total for 2nd level, 3000 for 3rd, 6000 for 4th, 10000 for 5th and so on. What this meant was that, as the party average level increased, a new PCs chance of ever catching up with the rest of them decreased. Not only did a 1st level replacement for a dead 5th level character stand very little chance of survival, that disadvantage would remain with the character for the rest of its career. What this did was pretty much force DMs to either allow players with dead characters to bring in new characters at the same (or close) level to the rest of the party, or risk either killing off the new characters over and over, or worse, lower the challenge level for the rest of the group.

By the time characters reached higher levels in earlier editions, say 9th or 10th level, there was no question of newer characters catching up with the group - when the rest of the party needs 100k or even 200k to level up, even the lowest level characters are going to catch up before that happens.

Which brings us to another interesting artifact of older editions, "Name Level".

Next time.

5E - What works in D&D

With all the speculation floating around about what 5E could possibly look like, or what folks would like it to look like, its interesting to ponder what exactly makes D&D work in the first place. The simple fact that people are out there still playing the earliest iteration of D&D means that there are some definite "core" elements that keep this game alive.

One of the first things that springs to mind is the Hit Die. This is, I think, the most important baseline of the game, and what everything else is built off of. Starting with OD&D, the baseline is this: a creature has 1 HD, or 1d6 hit points. An attack against it with, say, a sword, does 1d6 points of damage.

This is deceptively simple, but its an important reason why D&D works. Starting with this baseline, a regular sword has a chance to kill a regular guy in 1 round. The randomness of tossing dice to determine the regular guys hit points, whether or not you hit the regular guy, and how much damage you do if you do hit the regular guy, means nothing is predetermined, nothing can be taken for granted, and there will always be an element of risk.

As a baseline, this means you have something to measure against when someone gets better than the average guy (or "levels up"). More hit points, a better chance of hitting, etc. Or maybe your magic sword gets better than the regular sword. It lets you quantify tough concepts in a simple way that doesn't take hours to figure out, or bog down your game resolving simple combats so you can get on to the rest of the session.

For old school gamers, this can be taken for granted. Subsequent editions have gradually eroded away this essential baseline. 3E emphasized things like ability modifiers for monsters. A sword still did 1d8 points of damage against an orc, but that orc was now likely to have a Con modifier to its hit points and do a whole lot of damage, often more than that 1st level character could withstand. This created the expectation that in order for one's 1st level character to survive and succeed, its player would need to do some serious min/maxing, arranging scores and abilities for the optimum number of high modifiers to boost damage and hit points. Characters became a lot less randomly generated, and lot more "built", carefully constructed to counter an increasingly spiky baseline.

4E further eroded the baseline. Some might argue it practically washed it away. Orcs and PCs alike start out with 20+ hit points. Yet that sword is still doing 1d8 points of damage. The simplest element that made D&D work was removed: in one attack, a sword has a chance to kill you. No longer. In this latest edition, in addition to min-maxing a character, now groups had to min-max adventuring parties! It was necessary to have the best combination of striker, defender, controller, etc, so that those four or five PCs could carefully coordinate their attacks on the game board to kill that one orc.

The farther you get away from the 1 Hit Die baseline, the farther you get from quickly resolved combats, abstract resolutions that lend themselves to imaginative interpretations and descriptions, and sessions that emphasize goals and explorations over the minutiae of combat.

We'll look at another element of what makes D&D work tomorrow.

Reading the 5th edition right now!

With all the buzz around the internets lately, I figured I should track down a copy of this. Its just as well-written as I expected, and the maps are fantastic! Best of all, it includes a lot of the author's own original artwork. I highly recommend that you track down your own copy. It'll be interesting to see how closely the film follows this book.

Lost Castles of England

This is one of the best documentaries on castle construction and use I've seen. It focuses primarily on the early original wood-structure construction of English (Mott & Bailey) castles, and gives a great breakdown of their evolution into the great stone edifices we still see today. Seeing how they functioned in everyday life, how people lived in the little villages they defended, is certainly all useful for your gaming experience, especially in "howling wilderness" settings like WoHF.