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.

When it has no mechanical weight.

Alignment can be a touchy issue for gamers. Some people insist that it’s a great way to inform roleplaying, a starting point for your character. Others think it’s an unrealistic straight jacket, that nobody’s always good all of the time or wholly and irredeemably evil. It could be either of these things but most of the time it seems like an afterthought, a vestigial rule that lacks meaning for modern gamers.

Why does it lack meaning? Are the concepts of good and evil no longer relevant in a society of moral grays? Is it unrealistic to think that a character can be a shining beacon of his or her beliefs, an example to others? I kind of doubt that this is the case; I think these ideas are just as relevant now as they always were, and may actually be appealing to many because of their simplicity, their black and white nature. The problem, I think, is with implementation.

Let’s look at the current incarnation of D&D as an example. Alignment exists but it has very little effect on the game. Yes, your cleric has to be of an alignment compatible with his or her god, but what does being Good or Lawful Good or whatever actually mean? It can inform roleplay in the right hands but there’s no incentive to let it do so. I think a lot of people probably forget that it’s even on their character sheet; I certainly had to remind the paladin in my group that he’d find torture repugnant on more than one occasion.

Past editions gave it some weight: your alignment could be detected, certain weapons would respond well (or not so well) to certain alignments, and violating your alignment came with some sort of penalty. But even this isn’t a great way to incentivize alignment. It’s like working at a job you don’t care about: the threat of being fired will keep you working just well enough to not get fired, but you’re unlikely to do anything beyond that.

The solution (my solution at least) is incentive. Reward. I talk about incentives an awful lot for a reason: mechanical incentives are how you encourage the behavior you want in your games. If you want the Lawful Good paladin to uphold the law and oppose evil, you need to provide an incentive to do so that’s more attractive than the alternative. This could be as simple as providing bonuses to skill checks, attack rolls, damage, and so forth whenever the spirit of the alignment is being actively pursued. It could involve bonus XP. It could involve earning some sort of points or tokens that can be cashed in for benefits later. The exact incentive doesn’t really matter.

The important thing is that, if alignment is an important part of your game and the characters within your game, there needs to be a reason to pay attention to it. Punishment will help but will only get you so far; players will work a lot harder for rewards, things that make them better.

Alignment without mechanical weight, without incentive, fails to fulfil its purpose in the game. It might as well not even be there.

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?

Yesterday I sat down and wrote all of the mechanics for Becoming. The specifics of how to do things had been eluding me for a while even though I’d had some notes on things I wanted to achieve. Once I sat down to actually write them though, it was shockingly quick and easy. This is because I believe I subscribe to what I’ll call the “Just Goddamn Do It” school of game design.

What do I mean by that? Thinking about game design is great and talking about it is better. You can come up with all sorts of great ideas on your own and, just like no good plan survives contact with the enemy, you can’t help but change and generate ideas when you actually have someone to bounce ideas off of.

In the end though, thinking and talking about game design, while valuable, are not game design. There is simply no substitute for sitting down and writing your thoughts down, forcing yourself to actually think through the problems and come up with solutions. Writing it down makes the mechanics concrete, exposes many of the flaws, and causes you to see where your ideas need more development. I had a lot of ideas in my head but it wasn’t until I sat down that those ideas became a game.

I’ve also applied the “Just Goddamn Do It” philosophy to my freelance writing and I think that’s part of the reason why I’ve seen so much success lately. I was told not too long ago that the biggest reason that I got a particular job was because I responded to my email quickly; this is very much a manifestation of JGDI. Similarly, when asked if I want to work on a new project, I usually look at the work that I’m currently doing, consider for a moment, and say “what the hell?”

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!

In Austria, they celebrate Christmas hard core. Not satisfied with St. Nicholas rewarding only the good children, the jolly old fat man travels with the Krampus, a demon that punishes bad little boys and girls with a switch of birch branches, and steals the particularly naughty away to his lair to devour.

For those following along at home, this is a great way to inject a little holiday cheer–and terror–into your game. Krampus would make a great Christmas-themed D&D monster, and I can imagine an entire story arc in The Dresden Files in which the heroes must find out what’s happening to children all over the city.

Now, if you’d like some inspiration here’s a video of Krampuslauf, a parade devoted to celebrating the Krampus in all its terrible holiday glory.

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?