Multiple Solutions, and a Problem

Here's the adventure scenario: foul gnolls have raided the village and dragged off several young women to be sacrificed to their foul demon-lord. Your task is to get them back.

Now, how do you achieve that?

The obvious answer to this is "go and kill all the gnolls". That done, you can simply collect the prisoners and return home in time for the celebration.

The problem is that if every adventure runs like this, it pretty quickly gets to be a boring game - all your doing is fighting an escalating series of opponents, each carefully calculated to challenge but not overwhelm your PCs.

Ideally, you want the game to offer multiple solutions (and, even better, to do so without assuming any particular solution). And so, the PCs could instead sneak into the gnoll camp, locate the prisoners, and sneak them back out. Or they could go in and negotiate with the gnoll chief. Or they could impersonate the gnoll's foul demon-lord, declare that the prisoners are an unworthy sacrifice, and order they be set free. Or they could assassinate the gnoll shaman. Or they could raise a militia from the surrounding region and lead them to wipe out the gnolls. Or they could flood the caves wherein the neighbouring orc tribe lives, thus causing them to start raiding the gnolls. Or...

The goal here is to turn the game into more than just Fight A - Fight B - Fight C - Fight D - Extended Rest - Fight E - Fight F - Boss Fight - Big Party.

(And the reason that that's important is that computers have been able to offer that experience perfectly well for years. If all I want is "orc and pie", then I can just play "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance" on the PS2, and have a perfectly enjoyable time. And I don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on books to do so, nor deal with the hassles of trying to coordinate four other people so that they are free to play for 3 hours every other Tuesday. (And, yeah, electronic gaming has a buy-in cost. But how many potential gamers do you know who don't already own at least one console, or at least a PC, to play on? Which means the only cost is the game itself - and in that regard D&D actually loses!)

Now, on the face of it, 3e provides support for many of these things in the skill system. Stealth? Yep - use Hide and Move Silently. Diplomacy? Yep, there's an app for that. Disguise? Yep, same. Assassination? See stealth.

The problem comes when the group actually starts to consider such things. At which point, the Rogue might be all for stealth... but the Fighter has no ranks in the skills, and is wearing heavy armour to boot. Negotiation isn't an option because nobody learned to speak Gnoll, they've all dumped Charisma, and nobody took ranks in Diplomacy. Likewise disguise.

(And things don't get any better if one of these is an option - for stealth to be a real option, the entire party has to be built to make it so... which means that it's going to become the primary means of resolving problems.)

And so it goes. Pretty quickly, a system that has built-in support for multiple solutions to problems actually serves to reduce options, because although each member of the party can help with one of the alternatives, the only solution to which they can all meaningfully contribute is combat. And so, combat it is!

So what does this mean?

Well, for starters I'm starting to think that classes like the Rogue and the Bard are redundant. Rather than having classes designed for stealth or diplomacy, the game should instead make these something all characters can do, at least to an extent - so, if the party decides to sneak into the enemy camp, the Fighter just leaves his plate mail at home and he's good to go.

As a corollory to that, I'm inclined to think that gear should both have a bigger impact on a character's skills, and a lesser impact on their combat ability. In 3e, if the Fighter leaves behind his heavy armour, shield, and weapons, he's leaving behind a huge chunk of his effectiveness - he's going to get mauled if combat breaks out. (And the Fighter is particularly gear-dependent.) However, if being without armour isn't so crippling, and if being without his heavy weapons doesn't reduce his damage from HUGE to tiny, then being without becomes a reasonable choice to make. (And, added bonus, it means that the DM can use things like rust monsters, sundering effects, and the like without being pelted with dice.)

Finally, I'm starting to think that 5e is on the right track in eliminating skills as we know them. Or, rather, that the insertion of skills (starting with non-weapon proficiencies way back when) was a critical mistake in the game. Or at least some of them: I think things like Knowledge skills, 'movement' skills, and perception skills still have a place; it's just the skills that open up new ways to solve the problem that are, ironically, the problem - those alternate solutions should always be open.