Eleven Foot Pole

Hey guys, heads up. I've realised I have a whole heap of things to say about D&D 4th Edition; there's some fascinating design going on in that thing. The level of detail I want to go into is considerably greater than I'd normally subject people to on The Dust Forms Words, so I'm putting that discussion off-site.

So if you don't care about RPG design or D&D 4th Edition, keep reading here and you won't notice a thing.

BUT if you would like to get into the nitty-gritty of what makes 4th Ed tick, I'm doing that on a blog suggestively entitled Eleven Foot Pole (http://elevenfootpole.blogspot.com). I make no promises to update or maintain this new project; follow at your own risk.

On Pre-Painted Miniatures

I've been putting finishes on my own gaming pieces for years, but I have to say that when you can get eight pre-painted miniatures of this quality in a box at a cost somewhere between $1.25 and $2.75 AUD a figure it's really hard to see why I'd ever go back to unpainted metal.

The Oni above is courtesy of D&D Miniatures, which is pretty lacklustre as wargames go but is an excellent way of stocking up accessories for a tabletop 4th Edition game. Sadly the packs are randomised to enhance "collectability" so if you're looking to quickly make up a squad of kobolds you'll need to go trawling the internet for speciality dealers. I can't for the life of me understand why Wizards of the Coast aren't selling "goblin warband" boxed sets and suchlike.

The Note On The Body

I'll do my Game of the Year post in the first week of January, so you can look forward to the mystery being resolved then, but in the mean time I wanted to talk about the note on the body.

I'm currently running Keep on the Shadowfell for a group of friends. Keep was the first official pre-packaged adventure released for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Also, it's awful.

D&D is 34 years old. As a franchise, it has had an exceptionally large amount of time to get it right. The combined expertise and development resources of Wizards of the Coast should ensure that a D&D pre-packaged module is the finest tabletop RPG experience you will ever have.

Pfft. It's D&D. Storytelling is something that happens to other people.

Keep is classic D&D. This is something that could have been published in the early 80s. It's all 10 x 10 stone corridors, goblin chieftains, and giant magical traps that don't make a lick of sense. And there's nothing essentially wrong with that. That sort of stuff is what D&D is good at, and it's the reason you might be playing D&D rather than an actual roleplaying game.

But it tries. Keep has a story, and it tries to tell it. It's not a great story, but it's just enough to give some context to a bog-standard dungeon crawl. Providing the players ever learn it.

And this is where Keep falls down - because it can't tell a story. It sets out the whole backstory in the Dungeon Master's explanatory text - so the DM will know it, at least - and then provides very few ways to get that information across to the players.

It makes some attempts. There are a couple of bearded mentor-types who are capable of regurgitating the backstory to the players. They're only around in the first third of the game, so if you want to use them you'll either have to frontload the exposition into the first couple of sessions, or use flashbacks or suchlike to pace the story out. Later there's a ghost who does a "hear my sad story" number, but by the time the players get to him they'll have missed all the spots where knowing what's going on could have enriched the experience.

The other thing Keep tries is the note on the body.

It's not alone here. This is an RPG cliche, and you'll find it not only in pre-packaged tabletop offerings, but scattered across the entirety of the computerised RPG canon. Going back as far as the SSI Gold Box games, and spotted most recently for me in Mass Effect, it's a terrible storytelling device that just won't seem to die.

It works like this: the player finds the corpse of a fellow adventurer, who's met a sticky end. Upon searching the corpse (as one does) the player finds a letter, or note, or diary, that details the manner in which the adventurer met his or her death, warns of some danger, and entrusts the player with a quest of some sort.

This is terrible storytelling. Just... terrible. First of all, it's an infodump. It's a big string of information in a row that the player or players have to rapidly absorb. At worst, it's the DM talking non-stop for a couple of minutes while the players frantically take notes, and at best the DM's transcribed it all onto paper for the players to hand around and read one at a time.

Secondly, it's non-interactive. The players can't ask questions, they can't interrupt, they can't express themselves in response to the narrative.

Thirdly, it's not immediate. It's the past speaking to the present, and even if what killed the poor adventurer is still nearby, it's a non-dynamic event and doesn't have any of the drive and urgency that good narrative demands.

Fourthly, it's non-descriptive. Even the most floridly written note telling about how the adventurer was mauled by a bear isn't as vivid as seeing the adventurer mauled by a bear, but being too late to save him.

Fifthly, it's just dumb. Apparently it's some kind of adventurer tradition to always write some expository information on nearby paper immediately before meeting your untimely demise. It stretches the bounds of credulity, and it's a cliche to boot.

Forget the note on the body. It's a bad idea. As a storyteller, you can try harder. Let the players see the adventurer meeting their fate; have them fail to prevent the death. Let them encounter a dying traveller and have a conversation about what's happened to him, and experience his final moments.

Failing that, let the scene speak for itself. If the players are going to find the partially digested corpse of an adventurer inside a gelatinous cube, there's no need for it to be carrying a note reading, "Ack! Gelatinous cubes!" If you want the players to tell someone about a dead body, have the corpse be carrying a locket with a picture. Identifying the picture is a lot more fun than following directions on a note and it's more emotional as well.

This cliche works for villains too. Keep is full of characters who the players can kill, and then find a note on their body reading, "Secretly, I was a traitor, working for (insert name of major villain here)." It seems to have given up on the concept of players who talk first and kill second, and instead of building scenarios to encourage drama it's just defaulted to tacking on the exposition at the tail end of all the slaughtering. The whole module seems pathologically afraid of the idea of players having a conversation with an NPC.

I'm sick of it. I'm going to try and rework Keep to fix its apalling storytelling, but if you're thinking of telling a story to me in future, could you at least make an effort to avoid the note on the body?

Thanks.

D&D Is Not A Roleplaying Game

Picture a rulebook.

Picture a rulebook for a new ballgame.

The rulebook reads only, "Bring a ball to an open area, in the company of friends. Have fun using the ball. Tip: try throwing the ball, or kicking it with your feet."

That's not a ballgame. It's not rules to a ballgame. It's an activity, involving a ball.

In the same way, Dungeons & Dragons is not a roleplaying game.

A lot of people disagree with this. Among these people are a very small number of highly intelligent insightful individuals, who are in this case wrong in a highly intelligent insightful way. But the rest are simply people that have never played a storytelling game developed after 1990.

Dungeons & Dragons - and I write this while currently involved in no less than three 4th Edition campaigns - is very, very bad at handling roleplaying. It's not a roleplaying game. It may, if you feel charitable, be a roleplaying activity.

The reason I say this is that there is not a single mechanic within the game that supports, enables or encourages roleplaying. Picking any edition of the game from its origins through to today, that statement is true.

But, you say, the rules say the GM may award experience for roleplaying. Which was true, under the rules up to 3rd Edition. The current version of the game doesn't even mention this concept, although it could in some way be worked into the idea of "XP for overcoming encounters". But even under the old systems, a couple of lines indicating that the GM "may" award XP for roleplaying, without any further guidance, are hardly a firm support for roleplaying.

It's even more telling that the vast majority of a D&D character sheet is geared towards combat survivability. Key stats are hit points and armor class. When you're given a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Solving problems by methods other than combat is not only poorly supported by the rules, but actively prevents the player from engaging with the core rules.

To put it more clearly, D&D is a game about resolving combat, collecting loot and avoiding traps. Roleplaying is not part of the game - it is something you do between playing the game. Its function is roughly equivalent to the chat interface in World of Warcraft.

Compare and contrast this to the World of Darkness games, where character creation is based more around how you would like to roleplay your character than it is about your combat potential, and where sinking points into acquiring unique foibles and story hooks could be just as attractive as power maximisation. Often in these games key power gains were tied to your character overcoming certain personal faults such as fears, addictions or preconceptions.

Or 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings, which use "drama dice" or "void points" as a reward for strong roleplaying; these tokens can be traded off to allow the player direct influence over the fate of their character and the direction of the plot. Conflict resolution mechanics are drawn directly out of the desired tone and mood of the game, so that the outcomes of die rolls naturally reinforce the implicit genre rules.

I've picked those examples because despite their roleplaying focus they're strongly built around combat and physical danger, much like D&D. But if you go further afield to titles like Primetime Adventures and Amber you'll find systems that see combat as merely a subset of conflict resolution, and conflict resolution as something that should be subservient to the core thrust of the plot. These are real roleplaying games, where the roleplaying is the main play content.

So don't tell me Dungeons & Dragons is a roleplaying game. It's not. It's an excellent tabletop tactical boardgame, which distinguishes itself from titles like Descent and Heroquest by its significant level of character customisation and its encouragement to set the combat and looting gameplay within the context of a larger narrative.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to choosing my level 3 encounter power and speculating as to what feat I'll pick up at level 4.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

A friend has hooked me up with an advance copy of the AD&D 4th Edition rules and I am very impressed. We've just spent twelve hours or so doing back-to-back dungeon crawls with an accelerated levelling curve and it was a blast.

You need to know that AD&D still does not support roleplaying. I'm happy to say that it does not specifically prevent roleplaying. I guess. I mean, it's not like it will kill your family if you try. But 4th Edition knows that dungeon crawling is its core territory and it zeroes in on this concept like a fundamentalist sniper with a bead on a presidential candidate.

Roughly three quarters of the core ruleset is about combat in one way or another. If your game isn't stuffed full of delicious combat goodness then 4th Edition has little to offer you. Luckily, combat is so indecently entertaining that it feels strange to do it with your clothes still on. You'll need to be playing on a grid with miniatures or tokens to get the full effect, but once you're geared up then it's like someone turned on the "fun" tap and just let it start flooding your bathroom. Each and every class is now balanced for combat, including Clerics, and you'll be happy as a pig in mud whether you're cracking heads with a Rogue, Wizard, or even a Warlord.

Warlords, by the way, are one of the new core classes. What's happened here is that the core party roles have been split up. Melee DPS comes in a bunch of forms: the traditional fighter now appears to be an area-effect melee guy, while the paladin provides focused tanking, the rogue provides focused burst melee, and the warlord offers melee-based tactical support. Spellcasters get an at-will ranged magic attack from level 1, so running out of spells no longer gimps robe-wearers. Warlocks focus on targeted damage, teleportation and battlefield finessing, while Wizards are your traditional glass-cannon nukers.

The entire healing system has been reworked, with healing based off a supply of "healing surges" that each character possesses. Healing spells and abilities allow characters to consume one of these surges, which will heal a character for a quarter of their max HP. Almost every class has some kind of conditional healing ability, which means you can get down to the serious business of murdering goblins without having to drag around a preachy dedicated healer. I think it's a positive step forward for everyone; that whole co-dependant relationship Clerics used to have with other adventurers is a thing of the past, and priestly-types now get to show that they can throw down just as well as anyone else in a dungeon-based streetfight.

The races have also been changed, for no obvious reason. Half-orcs and gnomes are gone; high elves are now called Eladrin (and have an at-will blink power). Half-demon Tieflings are in, as are Dragonkin. While I'm loving the class changes, these race shifts are just bewildering and take away a bit of the AD&D flavour. It's like waking up and finding a mysterious "Uncle Bob" suddenly living in your house and everyone pretending like he's always been there.

Also the old nine-point alignment system is out the window; characters may now only choose from Good, Lawful Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil, and Unaligned.

If what you're looking for is a system in which to tell a story, then in the name of sweet zombie Jeebers try any other system but this. But if what you're here for is levelling up and looting then no-one does it better than AD&D, and now AD&D is doing it better than ever.