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?

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.

Some of you may have read the Gizmodo post that has become infamous in geek circles on the Internets. I won’t link to it here, because I don’t want to feed the nerd-baiting any more than I already have. Here’s the thing, though: something good has come of it. Namely, Speak Out with your Geek Out. The idea is simple: rather than turning to nerd rage and negativity, let’s light up the Internet for a week with positivity, and talk about all the things we love about our nerdy hobbies. I think this is a great idea. So, without further ado, and in no particular order, here are some things I love about my chosen flavors of geekitude.

Social Acceptance
This may not be a universal, but in my experience, geeks are really friendly, accepting people. All of my best friends are geeks (which shouldn’t really surprise you), and many of us are friends because of that common ground. When I finally found a game store in my area, they welcomed me with open arms, and now it’s a place where everybody knows my name (as the saying goes). GenCon, too, was a revelation; here was a place with 35,000 nerds all converging to revel in our shared passtimes. Everyone I met was friendly, helpful, and accepting of the people around them. It was a place where you could really be yourself, which was awesome.

Going along with this, I recently made a new friend via Twitter, through this shared culture of ours. He’s a really cool guy who is fun to hang out with and seems to like a lot of the same kinds of games that I do. What realy flabbergasted me (in a good way) was his willingness (and his wife’s) to come and help me and my wife out of a tight spot, after only knowing us for a few weeks. I’m not saying that something like that is specific to geeks, but I think it’s a great geek meets geek story that illustrates what I like about being a geek.

Shared Culture
Admit it: you love making obscure references to nerdy media and having other people laugh. It’s fun and energizing when that happens, and it’s unlikely to happen anwyere but around other geeks. I make these same jokes at work, and get blank stares back. I walk into my FLGS with a new nerd shirt on, and everyone applauds. It’s awesome.

Creativity
It seems like all of my friends are aspiring game designers (or game designers for real) these days. Everyone in the hobby wants to contribute back to the hobby, to make it better, richer, fuller for everyone else. That’s incredibly energizing and encouraging.

The Games
This list would be incomplete without mentioning the games, themselves. I love playing board games, role-playing games, video games; I’ll expand this to watching nerdy TV shows and movies, too, because it’s all part of the same culture. Withou these trappings of geekdom, I would likely feel out of place in this world; these things give me a subculture to belong to, they give me something to be passionate about. These things are why I do a lot of what I do.

So what about the rest of you? What do you love about gaming and beeing a geek? Sound off! Let’s see how much positivity we can get out there!

If there’s one thing I took away from running Old School Hack, it’s that less can be a lot more when it comes to character generation. I saw this in Gamma World, too, and while OSH isn’t nearly as random in its character generation as that game is, it still offers very little in the way of character customization.

For those who are unfamiliar (and really, the game is free, so you have no excuse) with the character generation system in OSH, it’s pretty simple. The basics are these: choose one of 7 classes, roll your attributes, choose one of 5 talents for your class, choose a weapon, choose some armor. There are some other choices that you make that amount to role-playing hooks, and have little to no impact on mechanics, but that’s basically it. At first blush, this seems limiting. A level 1 goblin isn’t going to look that different from another level 1 goblin, mechanically; that much is true. But there’s more there than is immediately apparent.

First of all, you can’t have two players with the same class. I actually like this limitation quite a bit, as it does allow for a lot more differentiation between PCs. The real genius is in how open-ended some of the mechanics are. Weapons and armor, for example, are simply generic categories: light armor, heavy armor, light weapon, reach weapon, etc. There are three kinds of armor to choose from, and there are five kinds of weapons. However, you’re encouraged to flavor these choices however you like.

This is an approach I really like: generic mechanics nearly devoid of flavor, so that the players can fill that flavor in, themselves. This is how you wind up with caber-wielding fighters and clerics who use their holy book as their primary weapon. It’s great fun, and leads to a lot of great role-playing situations (like when, isntead of using a torch, the party lit the figher’s caber on fire, which remained on fire for the rest of the session).

Another area where the minimalist approach works is in covering different situations. OSH does not try to come up with rules to cover every situation; it has a few simple rules that can be applied broadly, and some guidelines for coming up with rules for improvised actions. Players, when given this kind of freedom, tend to come up with crazy stuff. Rather than saying, “I attack the kobold”, you get, “I throw my caber at the kobold; after it hits him it ricochets off the wall and rolls back in front of my feet”.

This is reinforced by another simple yet elegant mechanic: awesome points. There’s a bowl of these in the middle of the table; players can reward each other awesome points from the bowl whenever another player does something they think is awesome. They can then spend those awesome points to do more awesome stuff. That’s pretty much it; specifics are not discussed. Instead, it’s left up to the players and the DM to determine what falls under the umbrealla of “awesome”.

Old School Hack is a very simple, streamlined, rules-light game. The whole thing is maybe thirty pages long. It never felt like there weren’t enough rules to handle things, though. And it always felt like people were using their mastery of the rules (which came quickly) to do all kinds of fantastic and interesting things. This is an approach to game design that I have grown to appreciate quite a bit.

Games, whether you’re talking about electronic games, role-playing games, or tabletop games, are generally thought of as products. That is, a boxed product or book is put on a shelf, you buy it, and that’s more or less the end of it. There are indications within some of these industries, though, that things are shifting toward a service-based model rather than a product-based model.

Wizards of the Coast has already partially converted to this system with D&D Insider, a system whereby you pay a monthly (or yearly) fee and gain access to new content on a regular (and frequent) basis, as well as online tools and updates for the physical products they sell. Similarly, Valve has shown leanings toward this model with many of their games; games like Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead are discreet products, but once you buy them you become the recipient of various content updates throughout the life of the product that keep you coming back, and keep you happy with your purchase (Valve provides these mostly free of charge, which is nice).

Things could go further, though, and current trends indicate that they might, at least in some cases. Valve would very much like video games to go service-based, I’m sure. Imagine if, instead of buying Half-Life 3 for $60, you paid $5 or $10 per month for it. This might give you access to the full game, as well as gauranteed content updates for the game throughout its life. It would be a shift, to be sure, but it might be a welcome one. Taking it further, what if you subscribed to a particular developer or publisher, or simply paid a subscription to Steam, in order to get games and game updates on a regular basis. Instead of games being an item that you had to splurge on from time to time, they would become a service you pay for like your cable or your Internet, or Netflix.

I can similarly imagine a future where Wizards of the Coast does away with physical books altogether, instead integrating their Insider service into devices like the iPad, Nook, and other tablets and e-readers. You pay your monthly fee, and any D&D content that comes out that month is yours. Download articles, get access to full books in electronic format, get digital tools; best of all, as long as you keep your subscription current, all of your content remains current, too.

It’s likely that not everyone sees this with the same rose-colored glasses that I view this possible future with. Many people would likely resist such a model, afraid of what would happen when they stopped paying, or if the service ceased to exist at some point. There are ways around these fears, but that’s not really within the scope of this post.

I’d very much like to hear what you think about all of this. Is this a trend that should continue? Is it something you’d be open to? Why or why not?