If you’ve been following my blogging and tweeting (and if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you have) then you may have come to the conclusion that I’m not a big fan of D&D. I’ve been very critical of the game lately, especially since the announcement of the next edtion of the game.

Here’s the thing: I criticize because I care.

D&D is responsible for a huge number of fond childhood memories for me, and quite a few more recent memories, too. For me, D&D is the total collection of all of these memories, a sort of hodge-podge mosaic of gaming. I remember dropping magically created walls on my enemies from the back of a dragon, spelunking my way through Undermountain and Dragon Mountain and Mountain Whose Name I Cannot Remember. I remember becoming the DM, the instant where the roles were reversed and a whole new world of gaming openend up for me. I remember poor Japhed, the NPC rogue who died at the fangs of a summoned snake, and I remember the kobold sorcerer who almost caused a TPK (don’t laugh; he was a badass kobold and probably had some serious anger management issues due to a massive inferiority complex).

For all these good memories there are plenty of bad ones, but these are mostly generic frustration with the rules and other assorted bullshit. I have to look this spell up again? I have to recalculate my hit points? This combat has taken TWO FREAKING HOURS and is only HALFWAY DONE?! Yeah, not all good times.

But for all that, D&D holds a special place in my mind, memories, and heart. It’s the game that put me on the path I walk now. It’s the vehicle through which I interact with many of my friends to this day. It’s a common language, a common ground, a form of shorthand for when I’m explaining my hobby to outsiders (you know, those people who look at you funny when you tell them you play role-playing games).

For all the frustrations I have (and have recently expresssed) with D&D, I owe it quite a bit. This is partially why I’m expressing my concerns and frustrations so vocally; I want it to be the very best game it can be. I want it to be able to provide me with more of those great memories. But I owe it many things, not the least of which is the benefit of the doubt.

Today Monte Cook posted a short article entitled Mechanics Supporting Story. I clicked on the link immediately. One of the things I love about most indie games is that their mechanics are informed by the story and built around it, and they not only support the story but are often inseparable from it. I was excited to hear what Monte would say about this idea and how it applied to D&D. I thought, “Man, wouldn’t it be great if D&D actually did mechanically support story telling, rather than having it just be the thing that you’re doing when you’re not rolling dice?”

I was disappointed. If you haven’t read the article, go do so. It won’t take long; it’s only a couple of paragraphs long.

Why was I disappointed? Because Monte wasn’t talking about mechanics that support story; he was talking about racial bonuses. He was talking about dwarves that get a +2 to damage with axes, or gnomes that get a +1 to hit against kobolds, or bards that . . . get a +1 to being dapper in fancy clothes. Or something. Yes, these things do offer some mechanical support to concepts found within the established fiction of D&D. But do they support story? Not really.

Let’s take the example of dwarves getting a +2 to damage with axes. This is supporting the concept of “dwarves use axes”, which is a concept that I know is near and dear to all of our grognardian little hearts. Great, so my dwarf uses an axe and gets the bonus. Where’s the story? The story — the only story so far — is that I have a dwarf who uses axes like 99% of the other dwarves in his hold. Not very interesting, is it? I’d argue that this kind of mechanic actually runs counter to supporting story; it discourages making characters with interesting and unique concepts, like dwarven wizards or rogues, because if you take one of those classes you’re not getting the full benefit of your race. It may not be punishment per se, but it skirts awfully close to that territory. Beyond that, though, the fact that my character uses an axe or a sword or a ship’s anchor is an expression of who my character is, but it doesn’t tell me anything about his motivations or his story arc. It does virtually nothing to mechanically support any story I have in mind, unless that story is, “I like to hit things with an axe.”

Now let’s look at that second one: gnomes and their bonus against kobolds. That one’s a little better because at least it implies some sort of emotion. Gnomes hate kobolds. Great. Do all gnomes hate kobolds? Even the ones who have never met a kobold? Even the ones raised by kobolds? Again, we’re discouraging alternate character concepts by rewarding the stereotype, to say nothing of the fact that we’re basically mechanizing racism.

My point is this: if you want to support story, support story. Don’t hand out some stereotypical racial bonuses and call it a day; that’s a half-measure at best. Give the players tools with which to express their characters, with which to tell their stories. Give them ways to take hold of the narrative and steer it in directions they think are interesting and fun. Let’s not forget that the DM is not the only storyteller at the table.

I was listening to an episode of the Giant Bombcast and they started talking about D&D and other tabletop RPGs. One of the people being interviewed mentioned that, in his current game, people tended to avoid combat because they felt that combat removed a lot of their agency within the world.

It’s an interesting idea, and it made me think about player agency and its relationship to the rules of a game. In D&D you can have quite a bit of player agency during role-playing scenes. This is dependent in a large way on the DM and his or her personal style of running the game, but in general you get to choose what you say, where you go, what you do. Occasionally you’ll have to make a skill check to see if the guard believes your lie or if the count is swayed by your honeyed words, but more than a few DMs will grant bonuses or even hand-wave these rolls for good role-playing. You have a lot of control over the narrative and over your character’s personal role within that narrative.

When combat starts, the dice start playing a much bigger role in the game. Success and failure become a lot more important, and this does tend to reduce player agency. You can say that you run up to the orc and stab it through the gut but if the dice don’t say that’s true, it’s not true. You can say you jump up into the air, grab the chandelier, and swing to the other side of the room, but botch your Acrobatics check and that simply won’t happen.

There are two issues at work here, I think. The first is that, the more the dice are involved, the less control you have as a player over narrative flow. You can describe your actions as much as you want but the dice are the final arbiter of what you’re capable of, and they can be fickle. To be fair, this is the case in most role-playing games: you describe what you want to happen, but the dice might disagree. Some games, though, give you a way to buy out of an unfortunate roll.

Fate, for example, has much the same sort of resolution mechanic that D&D does: you describe what you want, you make the roll, and if you’re successful it happens. The difference is that, in Fate, if you fail the roll you can invoke a few aspects to buy back your narrative control. You get to decide how important that particular part of the story is to you and, if it’s important, you can make it happen regardless of what the dice say. D&D doesn’t really have a mechanic to mitigate failed rolls, so the loss of narrative control is that much more potent.

The other issue is that failure is often boring in D&D. In some games you get to describe how you fail to perform your action. This means that, even though you didn’t get exactly what you wanted, you still get to push the narrative in a specific direction. In D&D, failure often means that nothing happens. Fail your to-hit roll? Oh, you missed the orc; move on. Fail your Arcana check? Oh, you don’t know anything important. Many DMs probably house-rule this away, and doing so is pretty easy. I can’t help but think that interesting options for failure should be a part of the game to begin with, though.

So what do you think? Do you feel a loss of narrative control in combat (or any other time when dice are a major component of the game)? Is that important to you? How would you like to see it change?

1. Let go.  Back when 3rd edition went out they released the game system and allowed anyone to produce content for the game .  Expanded rules or new adventures could be published (and sold) by anyone.  This meant less revenue for Wizards of the Coast but a better chance for user generated products to keep the game relevant.  I’m not expert in the field but I have to think the timing was off (3rd edition came out in 2000) to really take advantage of the culture of user generated content that the web has allowed over the past six or so years.  D&D should, therefore focus on creating fertile ground for users to build worlds, rules and supplemental material.
2. Embrace technology.  If computer games are relieving players of the need to focus on record keeping (encumbrance! spells! rules!) why not use that?  Use D&D insider to allow players (and the DM) to use computers (particularly tablets) to track a lot of this stuff.  Die rolls, equipment, damage, etc. can all be tracked and done with a computer and you don’t need much imagination to think about how much easier it would be if you could use a touchscreen.
3. Decide what you want to be.  If you want to be a combat and loot vehicle, own it.  If you want to be a game about roleplaying and storytelling, develop mechanics that can give a group of players a reasonable chance of having a funsession without one combat encounter.

So 5e D&D was announced. That’s a thing, I guess.

In the past I’ve always been a big fan of D&D. It got me into the hobby and I have a lot of nostalgia tied up with the game. When 3e was announced I followed the coverage rabidly, and I did the same with 4e. You’d think that 5e would provoke a similar response, but it hasn’t.

I feel mainly apathetic toward the prospect of 5e. I’ll give it a try. I’ll probably buy the core rulebooks and give them a look. I may even play it. But I am not excited to do so.

I cut my teeth on D&D and learned to roleplay with D&D. Lately though, I’ve been getting a lot more excited by games in the indie design space, games that are much more focused on giving a particular experience, or are tackling the question, “How do you incent the players to do awesome things?”

These are games that I feel D&D could learn from; skill challenges may have been a step in the right direction but they were a very small part of a largely combat-driven system and they were implemented in such a way that it took a lot of creative monkeying to get them to be exciting at the table. They didn’t do enough.

The problem is that I don’t think that D&D will learn from these games. They’re opening up playtesting to the community and soliciting feedback from them, and that’s great. Asking the community what they want out of a new edition is a good idea, but I think it’s going to ultimately produce a game I’m not that interested in anymore.

The D&D community is made up largely of people who prefer one existing edition or another. They’ll advocate for 5e to be more like that edition. That’s fine, but I fear that it’ll produce a game that’s basically “The Best of D&D”, and that’s not a game I’m interested in playing.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe WotC will surprise is all and do something really cool, innovative, and exciting, something that’ll get me back into D&D. If, however, the end result is some amalgam of the different editions with a few new mechanics on top, I probably won’t play it. The thing is, I already have D&D. I already have a D&D that I like. If all you’re giving me is another D&D, then why should I buy it?

Marcelo Dior graces us with a very personal post this time about his feelings regarding 5e. I echo some of his sentiments, though not necessarily for the same reasons. It’s very likely I’ll be posting a follow-up to this containing my own feelings on the subject.

Wizards of the Coast announced today that they’re preparing a new edition of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, this time with extensive input from open, public play-tests that will last until (I think) GenCon 2013.

I went through this a couple of times. I couldn’t wait to get the AD&D books as a kid when Christmas arrived (I wanted to play with classes AND races!). I looked forward to D&D 3rd edition when it was announced a dozen years ago, and I ate up every tidbit of news about 4e in 2007. Each edition change brought a mix of emotions to me who, like many, started in the hobby via OD&D or AD&D. But this most recent of announcements that we’ll be having a new edition (which, curiously, WotC isn’t calling “5e”) is the first one that is making me feel blue.

Last century, when I heard TSR had been acquired by the company that owned Magic: the Gathering, I was jumping for joy to know D&D would go on. More than decade later, in the year 2000, I’ve just left my parents’ home to build my own life in another town and my internet days were actually nights: using a dial-up connection (all that I could afford back when) I used to stay up from midnight to the crack of dawn because I used to work in the mornings and sleep in the afternoons. That’s how I followed the release and ultimately ordered the three 3e core rulebooks, one at a time. Do you remember they were released a couple of months in between? Also, do you remember they weren’t called “3rd edition”, just plain simple Dungeons & Dragons, albeit the number 3 was suggested in the Dragon and Dungeon Magazine logos?

3rd edition was a very welcome change of pace for me, as I was more than a little bored with AD&D. By the end of the 90‘s, the good ol’ rules system was… I don’t know, old. As I played other games at the time comparisons were inevitable, and the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, even with the more complex rules from the Players’ Options series, looked as if it was way beyond its prime, an old man trying to play with the younger kids. Even so, after the release of 3e I kept running my AD&D campaigns to make transition as smooth as possible — in one of my games, the change of magic system happened “in game”.

With 3e, I played it until I was sick of it — for real. By ‘06-’07 I was literally sick and tired of the game. When WotC announced 4e and started to release morsels of what was coming they found a very, very exciting consumer in me. In fact, I was so thrilled by the new edition that by May ’08 I had sold all of my 3rd edition books — I didn’t even want to see them again, something I hadn’t done with my AD&D books (to this day I still buy AD&D books, mainly Monstrous Compendiums and campaign settings). The transition from 3rd edition to 4e was a relief, a breath of new life into my favorite RPG. I finished up my two 3e campaigns with some kind of world-ending disaster instead of moving them up to the new system. Case in point, one of those campaigns was so long it had transitioned from AD&D 2nd edition to 3rd edition, but it didn’t make the jump to 4e: in the new edition, everything would start anew. From 1st level, with Keep on the Shadowfell.

I’m of the impression that 4e’s life span has been too short. If the next iteration of D&D comes out, as I imagine, at GenCon 2013, the present edition will have lived for five years. Third edition (counting it’s refit, 3.5) lived eight years, and AD&D 2nd edition lasted eleven years. That’s why, I think, contrary to what happened when AD&D and D&D3 came to be, this time I feel I haven’t played or run everything I wanted. There are still a lot of books I want to buy, and there are one or two in my shelf I haven’t read yet!

That’s why I intend to keep on running my weekly D&D game ‘till the very end. I hope the new edition turns out to be an awesome game, and I hope it’ll seduce me (especially because it’ll have to be a helluva game to make me quit playing 4e). I’m going to participate in the playtests if they call me, and I wonder what will happen to the D&D Insider service when there comes 5e — will both rules-systems live together for a while or will 4e options disappear?

That’s it. I’m saddened by the news the bard brought. Damn it, WotC, I still have plenty of Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition to play!

A little while back, during the Meetup of Doom, my friend Nick and I were talking about D&D and the kinds of things you can do to it to make it run more smoothly at the table, and to make it more improv-friendly. It got me to thinking about various ways that I’d like to hack the game before running it again. I figured I’d share them here, if for no other reason than to get some feedback on them.

Hacking Monsters
I like the way monsters work in 4e quite a bit. However, making encounters can be a real bear sometimes, and you have to spend a lot of time doing it if you want to fill a session. The problem with all this front-loaded prep work is that you wind up creating a fairly linear path for the PCs to move down.

I’d like to go for more of a sandbox-style game, running pretty much everything off of the Page 42 Table (or whatever the more modern version of that is). To that end, I’d probably wind up creating a few sets of generic monster stats and just making up monsters on the fly, adding abilities to them as I feel appropriate.

In addition, rather than tracking individual hit points, I’d like to use a series of check boxes. That is, a monster can take X hits before it dies, where X is probably around four or 5 for a standard monster, 6 for a brute, 8 for an elite, and 10 for a solo. Each time a player hits a monster, check off a box. If the player does a large amount of damage (as strikers are capable of doing), check off two or even three boxes. Easy book-keeping, and I’d probably feel better about just declaring a monster dead if a PC did something really cool to finish it off.

Hacking Powers and the Action Point Economy
I like powers. I like that they give everyone cool stuff to do. I also like action points, but I feel like they don’t do enough. There’s the start of an economy there with action points, but I feel like it could be pushed further. So, here are some ways I’d like to change action points, and how they interact with powers.

• At the beginning of the day, players start with action points equal to their level, or possibly half their level (not sure yet).
• They get the same number at each milestone.
• The various pillars of character creation–race, class, theme, and background–are treated sort of like Fate aspects. They can be invoked for a benefit by spending an action point, and they can be compelled in order to give players action points.
• Action points are used to power Encounter and Daily powers. These powers can’t be used on their own. Instead you spend X action points to use one of them, where X is probably somewhere around 4 for an Encounter power and 8 for a Daily. Powers of a level lower than your character level get a discount, allowing you to use them more often. As long as you can pay the price, you can use these powers.
• Doing awesome things allows your friends to award you action points!
• I’d also like to reduce the number of powers that PCs actually get. Instead of getting tons and tons of Encounters and Dailies, I’d like to have Encounters eventually replace At-Wills, and Dailies eventually replace Encounters. Because powers can be used multiple times, I’d probably try to stick to having two of each type of power: two At-Wills, two Encoutners, and two Dailies–at the most. This might have to be altered a bit for some of the Essentials classes that don’t use the standard power structure.
• Finally, and this isn’t necessarily related to the above stuff, I’d probably want to cap the game at level 10, but start telling epic-style stories around level 8 and paragon-style stories around level 5.

Hacking Conditions
Conditions eat up a lot of time and brain-space at the table. However, I like them and think they’re necessary to the game. Rather than getting rid of them, I’d like to just get rid of the explicit mechanical effects of conditions. Instead I’d run them sort of like aspects or consequences in Fate. So, if you’re Blinded, that doesn’t impose any kind of explicit penalty. However, any time you do something that being Blinded would affect, the DM can compel the condition to complicate your life. This winds up being an additional source of action points, and also allows for situations where players can use their conditions creatively to actually invoke them for a benefit.

Hacking Magic Items
This might be controversial: I want to get rid of magic items. Well, not entirely. I want to get rid of all of the pre-created magic items in the various books and replace the mathematical necessity of them with inherent bonuses. Magic items, themselves, would be pretty rare and, again, would be a bit more Fate-like. For example, you might find a sword that has magical properties like Flaming, Bloodthirsty, and Protective of its Wielder. These can then be invoked or compelled with action points.

Going along with this, I’d probably do away with the gold piece economy altogether and instead add a more abstract wealth system, similar to what’s found in Fate, World of Darkness, or d20 Modern.

So, that’s what I’d do. Thoughts?

Marcelo Dior comes back to us with a review of Heroes of the Feywild, WotC’s latest D&D supplement. He makes it sound pretty good, too.

It’s been a while since I read a D&D book (almost two years) so I was very surprised by the quality of this supplement. At fist, I though “oh boy, a book about fairies and pixies, rainbows and unicorns, all pink and flowery…” Man, was I wrong! Of course there are pixies and rainbows, Princes of Summer and cities of eternal autumn, but they’re the ones from old Greek and Irish myth — dangerous, deadly, incredibly powerful and not at all impressed with humanity. It’s the kind of fairy tale that reminds you all too well how fragile mortal life is, and how fleeting our achievements are compared to the immortal and godlike beings from beyond the Veil.

I need to give special praise for the layout of this book. Throughout the pages you see leaves, masks, branches and uncut stones decorating the book — a very nice touch that conveys the idea of a book about the Feywild. But the best part are the “Bard’s Tales” sections, side-blocks of stories small and large, conveying the most interesting, strange, and bizarre folklore tales. They not only set the mood at every chapter, section, and page, but also give immense amounts of material to weave into your games if you want to.

The only downside of the book is the lack of DM-related material: the book is 95% for the player, who will have a ball with the new backgrounds, races, and builds — not classes, mind you, but new powers for existing ones, and new builds, which I find brilliant, for there are more than enough character classes out there. I’d give special attention to the very last chapter, where you could create a rich backstory for the entire party at random — a tip of the hat to the old AD&D “Complete” supplements, I think. The three races added to the Dungeons & Dragons mythos (the hamadryad, the pixie and the satyr) are surprisingly interesting and fun. I’d not only allow, but indeed invite at least one character from those races in my table at any time.

If it wasn’t for the lack of love for the Dungeon Master, I’d have given Heroes of the Feywild 4 stars. Let’s hope something in the vein of The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond is in the pipeline for the Feywild.

Recently it was announced that Monte Cook was returning to work on D&D, an announcement that got the Internet in a tizzy. Speculation abounds, with many people asking the question: does this mean that 5th Edition is on its way? Certainly there have been hints of this, in Mike Mearls’ Legends and Lore articles. I’ve made it no secret that I’m a little burnt out on the current edition of D&D. I still like it, I still think it’s great; I play Encounters at my FLGS whenever I can. However, I’m finding more of what I enjoy playing in various indie RPGs, so that’s where my interests currently lie.

However, I’d be interested in seeing what Mearls and Cook do in a 5th edition of the game. I might not adopt it as readily as I did 4th Edition; I saw 4th as a vast improvement over 3.x, so I had immediate and intense enthusiasm for it, which lasted several years. That said, 4th Edition is not perfect. It is largely a combat engine, and I find that I want more than that in an RPG. With that in mind, I’m going to discuss some things I’d like to see in a 5th edition of the game.

A few disclaimers first. Some of these ideas are extrapolated from, or even shamelessly stolen from, a Twitter conversation between Sarah Darkmagic, Fred Hicks, and the Newbie DM. Credit where it’s due. Also, note my bias: I’m really into a variety of indie RPGs right now; most notably, FATE has been on my mind a lot due to a number of reasons, such as Bulldogs! and The Demolished Ones.

Mechanics that Support Roleplay
Back when D&D was my bread and butter, I would have scoffed at this notion. Why do you need mechanics to support roleplay? It’s roleplay; the players should be doing it, and there don’t need to be rules codifying it. I’ve since read a number of games in which such mechanics are employed, and I’ve changed my tune about them. A well-developed roleplay mechanic can stay out of the way when it’s not needed, but can reward and incentivize good characterization when it is.

The main issue, as I see it, is that everything on a D&D character sheet describes what your character does, what he or she is good at. Most of this is also combat-oriented; what does he or she do in a fight? There’s little to nothing on that character sheet that describes why the character does what he or she does. What are your characters goals? Motivations? Relationships? Fears? These things matter if you want to play a convincing person rather than a set of stats. While it’s true that there’s nothing preventing you from coming up with this stuff on your own, there’s nothing supporting it either. There’s nothing making it easier, or making it worth your time, within the game. Some groups will do it because that’s the kind of game they like; others won’t because it won’t even occur to them. I’d like to see rules space devoted to this kind of thing; not just advice for players, but real, concrete rules that encourage you to play a person in the game, with all the baggage that goes along with being an individual.

More Power to Skills
Skills are an underutilized commodity within D&D. Everybody has them, to some degree or another, but there are too many arbitrary limitations, and their utility is far too situational. In some games, skills will get a lot of use; people will jump across chasms, swing from chandeliers, run up walls, charm the guards, create cunning distractions, and so forth. That’s awesome. In other games, skills will be numbers on your sheet that mean very little. What I want to see is more mechanical benefit for taking those skills, and fewer restrictions on which skills you can take. Why, for example, can’t my fighter take Bluff without spending a feat on it? Are fighters incapable of lying without special training or effort? These sorts of things play to stereotypes, which can be a useful shorthand, but has the mechanical effect of limiting character concept potential.

And speaking of feats, I’d like to see feats directly tied to skills. I’m thinking specifically of a system similar to FATE’s, with feats taking a role similar to those of stunts. Rather than a bunch of conditional combat bonuses, I’d like to see feats used as ways to do additional things with your skills. Some of these things might be combat bonus-related; for example, maybe an Arcana feat can be taken to imbue a weapon with magical power for +1d6 fire damage for a short period of time. The key is that they’re tied to skills, making the choice of skills more important and the payoff for taking a particular skill greater.

Finally, I’d like to see the explicit link between skills and ability scores go away. In some cases, this makes sense; Endurance and Constitution make sense together. But I’d much rather see a system in which the bonuses are separate, and your description of how you use the skill determines which ability score bonus is added to it. For example, a fighter flexing his muscles menacingly could use Strength + Intimidation, while a ranger employing his knowledge of how to survive in a hostile environment could use Wisdom or Intelligence + Endurance to survive a desert’s heat. The description is a requisite for this; you can’t just say “I use Intelligence + Endurance”; you have to explain why the two go together.

Less Explicit Combat Focus for Powers
I like powers; I like the variety they can add to the game. However, they can also cause monotony, when players simply tell you what power they’re using, rather than describing their actions. I think that part of this is due to the fact that so many powers are simply attacks. I played a game of Old School Hack a while ago, which uses things called Talents, which are similar to D&D’s powers. However, many Talents are not simply attacks, and are not purely combat-focused. The magic-user for example, rather than taking a spell that might make her more powerful in combat, took a spell that allowed her to talk to doors, and unlock and lock them at will. It turned out to be a great choice, not just mechanically (though it was very helpful during the game), but for fleshing out her character and informing her decisions and descriptions during play. I’d like to see fewer powers per character, and I’d like to see them do something other than just damage + condition + effect. I’d like to see powers that you have to work a little bit in order to use, powers that require descriptions in order to make useful.

The Rest
There are a lot of things that I still like about D&D. I like the simplicity of hit points and defenses, and I like the way monsters work quite a bit. I like experience points and levels, and I like action points. The class system is simple, evocative, and fun, and I like the different races and how they work. I like a lot about D&D, but I think it can be more than it is. I hope it will be.

Recently it was announced that Monte Cook was returning to work on D&D, an announcement that got the Internet in a tizzy. Speculation abounds, with many people asking the question: does this mean that 5th Edition is on its way? Certainly there have been hints of this, in Mike Mearls’ Legends and Lore articles. I’ve made it no secret that I’m a little burnt out on the current edition of D&D. I still like it, I still think it’s great; I play Encounters at my FLGS whenever I can. However, I’m finding more of what I enjoy playing in various indie RPGs, so that’s where my interests currently lie.

However, I’d be interested in seeing what Mearls and Cook do in a 5th edition of the game. I might not adopt it as readily as I did 4th Edition; I saw 4th as a vast improvement over 3.x, so I had immediate and intense enthusiasm for it, which lasted several years. That said, 4th Edition is not perfect. It is largely a combat engine, and I find that I want more than that in an RPG. With that in mind, I’m going to discuss some things I’d like to see in a 5th edition of the game.

A few disclaimers first. Some of these ideas are extrapolated from, or even shamelessly stolen from, a Twitter conversation between Sarah Darkmagic, Fred Hicks, and the Newbie DM. Credit where it’s due. Also, note my bias: I’m really into a variety of indie RPGs right now; most notably, FATE has been on my mind a lot due to a number of reasons, such as Bulldogs! and The Demolished Ones.

Mechanics that Support Roleplay
Back when D&D was my bread and butter, I would have scoffed at this notion. Why do you need mechanics to support roleplay? It’s roleplay; the players should be doing it, and there don’t need to be rules codifying it. I’ve since read a number of games in which such mechanics are employed, and I’ve changed my tune about them. A well-developed roleplay mechanic can stay out of the way when it’s not needed, but can reward and incentivize good characterization when it is.

The main issue, as I see it, is that everything on a D&D character sheet describes what your character does, what he or she is good at. Most of this is also combat-oriented; what does he or she do in a fight? There’s little to nothing on that character sheet that describes why the character does what he or she does. What are your characters goals? Motivations? Relationships? Fears? These things matter if you want to play a convincing person rather than a set of stats. While it’s true that there’s nothing preventing you from coming up with this stuff on your own, there’s nothing supporting it either. There’s nothing making it easier, or making it worth your time, within the game. Some groups will do it because that’s the kind of game they like; others won’t because it won’t even occur to them. I’d like to see rules space devoted to this kind of thing; not just advice for players, but real, concrete rules that encourage you to play a person in the game, with all the baggage that goes along with being an individual.

More Power to Skills
Skills are an underutilized commodity within D&D. Everybody has them, to some degree or another, but there are too many arbitrary limitations, and their utility is far too situational. In some games, skills will get a lot of use; people will jump across chasms, swing from chandeliers, run up walls, charm the guards, create cunning distractions, and so forth. That’s awesome. In other games, skills will be numbers on your sheet that mean very little. What I want to see is more mechanical benefit for taking those skills, and fewer restrictions on which skills you can take. Why, for example, can’t my fighter take Bluff without spending a feat on it? Are fighters incapable of lying without special training or effort? These sorts of things play to stereotypes, which can be a useful shorthand, but has the mechanical effect of limiting character concept potential.

And speaking of feats, I’d like to see feats directly tied to skills. I’m thinking specifically of a system similar to FATE’s, with feats taking a role similar to those of stunts. Rather than a bunch of conditional combat bonuses, I’d like to see feats used as ways to do additional things with your skills. Some of these things might be combat bonus-related; for example, maybe an Arcana feat can be taken to imbue a weapon with magical power for +1d6 fire damage for a short period of time. The key is that they’re tied to skills, making the choice of skills more important and the payoff for taking a particular skill greater.

Finally, I’d like to see the explicit link between skills and ability scores go away. In some cases, this makes sense; Endurance and Constitution make sense together. But I’d much rather see a system in which the bonuses are separate, and your description of how you use the skill determines which ability score bonus is added to it. For example, a fighter flexing his muscles menacingly could use Strength + Intimidation, while a ranger employing his knowledge of how to survive in a hostile environment could use Wisdom or Intelligence + Endurance to survive a desert’s heat. The description is a requisite for this; you can’t just say “I use Intelligence + Endurance”; you have to explain why the two go together.

Less Explicit Combat Focus for Powers
I like powers; I like the variety they can add to the game. However, they can also cause monotony, when players simply tell you what power they’re using, rather than describing their actions. I think that part of this is due to the fact that so many powers are simply attacks. I played a game of Old School Hack a while ago, which uses things called Talents, which are similar to D&D’s powers. However, many Talents are not simply attacks, and are not purely combat-focused. The magic-user for example, rather than taking a spell that might make her more powerful in combat, took a spell that allowed her to talk to doors, and unlock and lock them at will. It turned out to be a great choice, not just mechanically (though it was very helpful during the game), but for fleshing out her character and informing her decisions and descriptions during play. I’d like to see fewer powers per character, and I’d like to see them do something other than just damage + condition + effect. I’d like to see powers that you have to work a little bit in order to use, powers that require descriptions in order to make useful.

The Rest
There are a lot of things that I still like about D&D. I like the simplicity of hit points and defenses, and I like the way monsters work quite a bit. I like experience points and levels, and I like action points. The class system is simple, evocative, and fun, and I like the different races and how they work. I like a lot about D&D, but I think it can be more than it is. I hope it will be.