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?

I’m not going to be blacking out my site today. I’m not doing so because I don’t believe that doing so will make any kind of difference. This is not just because I have a small audience (though that’s certainly part of it). I think that sites like Wikipedia blacking out is a commendable sacrifice on their part but, ultimately, I don’t think it does anything either.

The reason for this is that I don’t believe the people with decision-making power care that this is happening, if they even notice at all. I understand that people want to do something about SOPA, but I’m not sure that blacking out your site is actually going to affect change, no matter how big your site is. And I’m certainly sure that changing your Facebook or Twitter avatar will not affect change.

So what am I doing? I’m going to voice my opinion. I won’t black out this site, but this will be the only post going up today. The point of this post is simple: SOPA is wrong. It’s an enormous overreaction to something that it doesn’t even have a prayer of stopping, and it’s likely that it’ll cause more problems than it fixes. If you’re so inclined, I’d encourage you to contact a representative of government and share your opinion with them.

At Metatopia I heard a quote that I can’t get out of my head. I’m unsure who to attribute the quote to (it could be Ken Hite, Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue, Brennan Taylor, Joshua A.C. Newman, or any number of smart people; I just don’t remember), but the quote itself strikes me as a set of words for a game designer to live by.

“If you want your game to be about something, you need mechanics supporting that thing.”

The corrolary of this is: If you do not mechanically support a thing, your game is not about that thing. You can say it is and you can support it with your fiction, but the grim truth is that, if you do not incent players to do the things you want them to do in your game, they may never do those things.

When it came time to design mechanics for Becoming, this quote was rattling around in my head the whole time. I knew what I wanted my game to be about. I wanted Becoming to be about what it costs to be a hero, not just in terms of the adversity that the hero must overcome but what he or she must give up to overcome it. The game is, at its core, about heroic sacrifice. At least, that’s what I wanted it to be about; I needed to make sure the mechanics said that too.

Becoming has a dice-based resolution mechanic where the Hero rolls dice to try to overcome a static difficulty set by a member of the Chorus (roughly analagous to a GM, at least a little bit). More dice equals higher chance of victory, and failure means that the Hero must pay a cost of some sort. I knew this much, but it wasn’t enough. The mechanic was sound, but it didn’t encourage sacrifice; it was a simple pass-fail mechanic that required sacrifice as a result of failure, but it wasn’t enough. In order for the Hero’s sacrifice to be meaningful in this game, it had to be a choice.

That’s where the bargaining mechanic came from. The Chorus is made up of three players, and there’s a very good reason for that. While only one player at a time may place a challenge in front of the Hero, the other members are not without purpose during that scene. In most cases the Hero will be outgunned, or at least daunted, by the difficulty of the challenge in front of him or her. Success is going to be a slim possibility.

That’s where the rest of the Chorus come in. The Hero can bargain with the other two members of the Chorus, giving up pieces of him/herself in order to gain aid from them. This aid comes in the form of additional dice for the most part, but it costs the Hero some of his/her own dice that are not currently being used (the Hero can’t bring all of his/her dice to bear on a single challenge). In most cases the Hero has the ability to pull off a victory, but it will come at a cost. The interesting bits come when the Hero has to weigh the cost of victory against the cost of failure, and decide which is the lesser evil.

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.

A month or so ago I got the seed of an idea. That seed sat in my head, refusing to let me think about other things until I watered it, nurtured it, and let it start growing. I did so, and it’s growing into a game called Becoming.

Rather than simply explaining what Becoming is, I’ll let my pitch do the talking.

Becoming is a game about what you must sacrifice to be a hero. Taking on the mantle of the hero makes you an outcast. In order to save the things you love, you must lose them. When you complete your quest will you still be a hero? Or have you become something else?

Simply put, Becoming is a game about going on a heroic journey, but there’s a twist: the outcome of the journey is not in doubt. You will succeed in your quest. You will slay the dragon or find a new homeworld for Earth. What is in doubt is the price of your heroism: what will you have to give up? Will you still be the same person at the end of the quest? Will you be able to go home again?

The core of the game is all about making choices, about choosing what to give up and what to hold on to. There is dice rolling. There are conflict resolution mechaincs. But tied intrinsicly to these things is a system of bargaining and of sacrifice.

The game is still in its early stages. I don’t have a fully playtestable prototype yet, but I will. I’ve made it my goal to get this thing written and published this year. My intent is to document the design process to some extent. Because I’m very excited about it, you’ll likely hear more about it in the future.

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.

The more I read indie RPGs, the more I want to read and play more indie RPGs. More than that, I want to share the awesome of indie RPGs with other people, people who don’t know that there are games other than D&D and Pathfinder out there.

To that end, I’m in the process of making arrangements with Rob, the proprietor of Family Fun Hobbies in Hamilton, NJ, to start up a monthly indie game day. The idea is that, once per month, I come into the store and run a different indie game with the intent of getting people excited about them and showing them what’s out there.

I already have a roster of games I want to run. I’ll probably start with Fiasco, and follow that up with Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple and Zombie Cinema. It should be fun; I can’t wait.