Retries

One of the key features of 5e is something called "bounded accuracy". Effectively, what this means is that the bonuses to various rolls are much more constrained - a character who is 'good' at something will generally find he gets most of his bonus in the first few levels, and will then only see a fairly moderate increase as time goes on. This is matched, of course, with a much more bounded set of DCs.

(There are exceptions, of course, especially if a player wants to burn a lot of resource on a particular speciality. And I exaggerate somewhat, too. But the above is a reasonably good description.)

In real play, what that means is that if the whole group rolls for something (initiative, for example), it's likely that whoever rolls best on the die will end up with the best overall total. This differs from 3e, in particular, where it was not uncommon for a character who is 'good' at something to have a bonus +20 or more higher than the character who is 'poor' at that thing.

That, of course, is something of a mixed blessing. In my opinion, though, it's a net good.

But it does have two important consequences. Firstly, the DM needs to be very wary about allowing retries, and likewise the DM needs to control group rolls quite carefully. Otherwise, the likelihood is that some of the dice will come up especially well or badly, skewing the results quite harshly.

So, here's what I recommend:

Firstly, you should only roll where there's a meaningful chance of failure. If the party want to search a room and they have all the time in the world, there's no point in rolling - they should find whatever it is that is there to be found. (Of course, it's possible that there might be something so well hidden that they can't find it, no matter how they search. But even in that case, why bother rolling - they can't find it!)

Secondly, retries should only be allowed if the situation significantly changes. (In combat, of course, the situation is constantly shifting, hence the "why can you retry an attack roll?" concundrum doens't apply.) What that means is that if the Rogue fails to open a lock, he does not get to retry unless his bonus increases, he gets a better set of tools, or something else significantly shifts - that first roll represents his best possible effort. (And note that the whole situation has to change. So if the Rogue packs a set of 'normal' tools and a set of 'masterwork' tools, he can't use them in that order to get two rolls. That is, to put not too fine a point on it, cheating.)

Thirdly, as much as possible there should be consequences for failure, and those consequences should be spelled out as clearly as possible. If the party fail to break down a door, this will notify whoever is beyond the door to their presence. The party should probably know that before the first roll. (Incidentally, this is a case where I would allow a retry... sort of. I actually wouldn't bother with the second roll - after the first failure, they can automatically break down the door, if that is at all possible... they just suffer whatever the consequences of that first failure were.) Of course, in some cases it's valid to have hidden consequences for failure - in the case of a hidden trap, or similar. But that should be the exception, not the rule.

Fourthly, in situations where the whole party engage in a single task, don't have everyone roll. Instead, have whoever declared the action first roll (since it was his idea) with advantage, representing the assistance of the rest of the party. (Conversely, if it's something like sneaking around, you probably want one person to roll with disadvantage - representing the Rogue using his advanced skill, but being hampered by the need to help the others. That gives slightly odd results, since the full-plate-wearing Fighter thus benefits from the Rogue's advanced skill, but it's not too horrible.)

Of course, don't forget that the game already has some helpful mechanisms in place for this purpose. In some cases a group check may well be appropriate (everyone rolls, and if half the party succeed then everyone succeeds; otherwise everyone fails). In other cases, Passive Perception may well apply (in an ambush, roll Stealth for the enemy and compare with the PCs' PP scores - this allows some to be surprised and not others).

I should note one other thing: unlike some DM's, I'm not of the view that you should seek to minimise the roll of the dice in the game. Rolling dice is fun, and provides a degree of uncertainty that is generally beneficial to RPGs (in my opinion). But I am aware that the dice should be used carefully, lest bizarre and unwanted results crop up and start derailing things.

Adherent of a Repeated Meme

One of the things that has become evident during my scan-and-shred exercise is that I repeat the same ideas and motifs a lot. Quite a bit of this seems to come from aping what I thought I saw in published campaigns, but it's fair to say that even back in the day those published settings weren't quite so repetitive. (Seriously, every one of the settings I've tackled has had a number of cities, each with exactly three taverns detailed - one that is a good haunt for adventurers, one that is of moderate quality, and one that is a dive. And that's only the most easily explained repeat...)

Of course, I was aware of that to a certain extent. I've always had particular ideas, characters, and symbols that I like to come back to again and again. And in some cases, that's no bad thing. As I've said before, my favourite one-time author (David Gemmell) basically retold the same story again and again - but it was a good story.

Still, what this highlights is that I would certainly benefit from more variety in my thinking. Though that might be tricky - even being aware of the internal biases, it's tricky to recognise them when applying them in practice, and it's also hard to train the brain to produce new ideas.

(On the other hand, the exercise has thrown up some ideas that I hadn't revisited in quite some time, and some of the other stuff has fired some interesting notions, some of which had never occurred to me before. It has certainly been an interesting and worthwhile process!)

A Spelljammer Campaign

WotC keep dropping hints that they want to do something with Spelljammer. Which is fine, but does fill me with a little trepidation: I haven't exactly been thrilled with their storylines so far, there's a suggestion that they're going to merge Spelljammer with Planescape (which sounds about as appealing as putting fish sauce on cherry ice cream - two strong flavours that just don't go together), and there's also the issue that every time they've looked at Spelljammer since they original they've contrived to mess it up.

But apart from that, it should be great!

Anyway, having given it a little thought, I think I would suggest approaching such a storyline in the vein of "The Odyssey", the saga of Cugel the Clever, or indeed "Star Trek: Voyager".

That is, start the PCs are adventurers somewhere in the Forgotten Realms, and be sure to given them very strong ties to that setting. Then, have them fall into a magical portal/be banished by an angry wizard/get captured by Neogi slavers and stolen away.

The bottom line is that they must quickly find themselves far from home, preferably at a Spelljammer hub, and motivated to go on a journey. Then give them ready access to a ship, and probably some friendly NPCs to help crew it until they're ready to take the Helm, and off they go! Thereafter, each chapter can be a visit to a separate Sphere, with some adventure to be had therein, culminating in them getting home and fighting off the Big Bad.

(Actually, thinking some more, I'd maybe run with the "captured by Neogi" approach. Then have a "training montage" as they learn the operation of a Spelljammer vessel, followed by their sale to a cruel pirate near the Rock of Bral. And then you give them an opportunity for a quick mutiny, a visit to the space port, and off you go! In addition to getting them up and running with their own ship quickly, and equipped with the skills to use it, it also establishes an ideal Big Bad - on returning home they can take down those same slavers who got them into this mess in the first place.)

And now I feel bad that I don't have a group ready to hand - I quite fancy the notion of running that campaign!

Bit of a Problem

Over the past couple of years, I have become increasingly convinced that D&D just has a bad set of ability scores. Indeed, I'm increasingly inclined to think that characters should have three: Body, Mind, and Soul (with the possible inclusion of a fourth, in the form of Luck).

That's not a perfect arrangement, of course - under that model it's not really possible to differentiate between the guy who is really strong, the guy who is just really tough, and the guy who is really agile. And it probably suffers from a certain amount of blurring between Mind and Soul (though no worse than the current blurring between Int and Wis). However, I'd be inclined to resolve at least some of this by having each player pick a Trait for his character - either in addition to the current Race, Class, Background trio, or perhaps instead of the 'Race' option (in which case 'Dwarf', 'Elf', and the like would become Traits).

All that said, there's a bit of a problem with this: the six ability scores used by D&D are one of the few truly sacred cows of the system - the moment the game switches to something else, it ceases to be recognisably D&D (the others are classes, levels, and hit points).

What that means is a couple of things: Firstly, D&D is probably stuck with a set of ability scores that really isn't too good. And where D&D leads, the rest of the RPG market follows. Secondly, I'm most definitely not in the market for any RPG that uses those ability scores or any near variant of them - I'm just not in the market for any near-D&D game. That said, at the moment I'm pretty much not in the market for any RPG at all, so there's always that to consider...

Rulings Not Rules

About a week ago, I was involved in a discussion concerning Sage Advice - the semi-official rules-clarification service performed on Twitter by a WotC rep. One of the comments that was made was from someone who said they would require their DM to follow Sage Advice, a position that I found to be... odd.

My position on Sage Advice is largely forged by decades of reading the column in Dragon magazine, and then online. In that time, I saw more than a few cases where the Sage got things wrong. That should hardly be surprising, given the sheer volume of rules and the sheer length of time involved. The upshot, then, is that I describe Sage Advice as having "a long and glorious history of getting things wrong". It's not that the Sage is always wrong, or even wrong the majority of the time. But traditionally he's been wrong often enough for me to take his rulings with a hefty pinch of salt.

Besides, there's the small issue that the Sage isn't running my game, I am. If a player wants to insist on a DM following Sage Advice, he's welcome to go and lobby the Sage for a position at his table!

All of that is largely meaningless introduction, though. What I mostly want to talk about is how I handle rules ambiguities at the table.

The scenario in question is this: we're playing the game, and something comes up where I'm not immediately certain how the rules should operate. How to proceed?

Well, firstly, I might go look up the relevant bit of the rules. However, I'll only do this if I have a fairly solid idea where to find the relevant text. Unfortunately, most RPG books are pretty badly organised, and 5e is no different in that regard. And although 5e is better than most in that it has an index, unfortunately that index is almost entirely useless - to the point where I consider it wasted pages. So I won't go hunting for rules - I can either find them quickly or we move on.

If I don't have a handy rules reference, or if I do but the rules still aren't clear, then I'll make a ruling and we'll move on. I'll always try to err on the side of the PCs in this regard - the game can generally bounce back from rulings that are over-generous; it's harder to come back from a TPK! But my over-riding principle is that it's better to keep the game moving than to get it absolutely spot-on.

Of course, that means there is the real possibility that a player might not agree with my ruling. So, what happens then?

Well, it depends.

If the player just feels it should have been ruled otherwise, he can state his case... quickly. But it's unlikely to change my mind, and I expect him to accept the eventual ruling in good grace.

If the player comes armed with a reference to the RAW, especially if I haven't bothered to look for that rule, or if I looked but didn't find it, then he certainly gets a hearing. And under that circumstance it's much more likely I'll reconsider. But it's not certain that I'll do so. Again, though, the DM's eventual ruling is final.

(Tweets from Sage Advice aren't references to RAW, so see the first case above. As I noted, the Sage isn't running my game.)

Of course, once the game is done, I'm quite happy to discuss the matter much further. And if I made the wrong ruling, I'm not overly averse to admitting as much (and will endeavour to rule correctly if that scenario comes up again). The point is not to enforce some sort of tyrannical "my way or the high way" style of game - it's purely that experience has taught me that it's usually better for the game to flow quickly than to proceed with 100% rules accuracy. I'm not sure that latter case is even possible anyway.

Interesting Deal-breakers

Reading through the "Dungeon Crawl Classics" core rulebook is an interesting experience. On every other page I seem to come across something that makes me think 'cool'... but I'm also pretty clear that I'll never actually run this game.

On the one hand, it is a lovely book, full of evocative and fun artwork. And things like the critical hit tables leave me thinking that it could be a heap of fun to play. The dice chain mechanics are very interesting, as indeed are the rules for multiple actions. And capping the game at 10th level is a really good idea, one that I wish D&D had adopted at least two editions ago.

However, the game also has at least two deal-breakers that say it's just not for me. The first is the blunt fact that if I ever run a D&D-like game again, it will be D&D (and almost certainly 5e, unless and until 6e comes out). The simple truth is that anything else is just more hassle than it's worth. (And while it's true that 5e is very far from being perfect, and indeed has some extremely annoying imperfections, that's true of pretty much all RPGs.)

The second deal-breaker, at least thus far, has been the use of race-as-class. This is one of those decisions that I can kinda-sorta understand from an old school point of view... but it's also not something that appeals. And it's something that's just embedded enough that removing it would be a real pain. (I actually really like what they've done with halflings in DCC, but still...)

The net effect of this is that I'm busily reading a book while knowing full well that I won't use it. And, given my recent efforts to clear out a load of dross from my shelves, I'm also sorely aware that this is a book I wouldn't buy now. Indeed, if it wasn't for the fact that it's so very new, it's almost certainly a book that would be currently heading out the door.

It all makes for a very weird experience.

Stuff Nobody Ever Uses

In my scan-and-shred exercise, I've taken a short break from dealing with old settings and have instead been working on old rules notes for the past several days. In that time I've been archiving old hand-written notes detailing new classes, kits (2nd Ed's version of sub-classes), spells, equipment, and so on.

And the really depressing thing in amongst that is that, with very few exceptions, nobody ever used this material. Most of the spells were never cast, most of the kits never saw use, and so on and so forth. They just soaked up time (which, thankfully, I had in abundance) and paper, and then soaked up space through several moves.

There's a lesson there: material that nobody ever uses has no value. Which in turn means one of two things:

If generating that material is enjoyable in its own right, or it serves to train you in some skills that you will put to good use later, then generating that material has some value in itself - carry on. (But you probably shouldn't be particularly sentimental about it - once you've generated it, it has already served its purpose and can go.)

But if generating that material doesn't have some intrinsic value, it's better not to bother. Go do something that does have value instead - be that creating something that will see use, honing some other useful skill, or doing something else entirely. Doing work just for the sake of doing that work is a waste of time.

Basically, it all comes back to value-add again - does an activity provide enough benefit (of some kind) to justify itself? Does buying a sourcebook provide enough benefit to justify the sticker-price? Or would the resources be better employed somewhere else?

(One thing amused me, though: in among my notes I found a revised spell memorisation/casting system for 2nd Ed AD&D. Almost exactly the same rules are now found in the 5e PHB.)

Revising as You Go

During the writing of the previous post I checked back at a some of the older work on the "Ultimates Version", and I've noticed a number of inconsistencies that have already slipped in (notably references to non-human deities and monotheism). That's probably inevitable when you work on things over time.

They also illustrate a massive danger when working on a big project like this: the temptation to go back and fix the inconsistencies as you go. The problem is that if you do that you end up going on to fix "one more thing"... and one more, and another, and so on. And so forward progress largely becomes impossible.

So, I won't be doing that. Best to try to ignore any inconsistencies for now - just assume that later stuff always supersedes the old. (One of the better bits of advice I got in school came from an English teacher, who advised just getting an essay written in any form. Once that's done, it's much easier to redraft, since at least all the ideas you need are out there for you to see.)

These posts are very much a first draft anyway. Eventually, I hope to gather them all up and write up the whole thing in some final version.

Terafa's Named Wizards

One of the cleverer bits of world-building in D&D, going right back to 1st edition, is the use of a small number of 'names' in spell descriptors: Tenser's Floating Disc, Rary's Mnemonic Enhancer, and so forth. For the most part, these are named for PCs back in the first campaign (and one real person), but they serve to provide just a smattering of world detail in the game (just why was Bigby obsessed with hands?), without being obtrusive.

(Of course, there's a downside - if you're playing in a setting where Mordenkainen is unknown, what do you do with his spells? Though there's an argument that it's best just to not worry about it - after all, Nystul is unknown in every setting.)

Anyway, for the purposes of Terafa, I am similarly inclined to introduce a number of 'named' wizards. I will almost certainly not get around to populating spells for all, or perhaps even any, of them, but they'll serve as a useful set of names to drop in whenever I need a name for a spell, book, magical theorem, or other bit of weirdness. And, of course, we've already seen one: Cavcari famously has his Last Invocation.

At this point, the bit of my mind that likes things neat and orderly notes that there are traditionally eight schools of magic (Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, and Transmutation), and so the ideal would be to have eight 'named' wizards, one for each school. So that's what I'm not going to do...

• Alendra: A contemporary of Drachias, Alendra attempted to prevent his ascension to godhood but was thwarted as her alliegance to The Usurper was exposed. She was a mistress of the arts of compulsion and manipulation, and an Archmage of the school of Enchantment. Alendra is believed to have been slain by Drachias, although some suggest that she instead stole immortality from a Fae queen.
  
• Cavcari: Despite being best known for his famous Last Invocation, Cavcari was actually an Archmage of the school of Necromancy - his obsession was with death and its avoidance. He was counted as a master of the black arts, but is also credited with ending the Necrotic Plague. It is whispered that he finally found en exception to his own Last Invocation, and thus found a means to cheat death. However, it is also suggested that he was finally struck down by the gods themselves. Whether this was due to his hubris at including them in his Last Invocation, or out of frustration that they could not escape it depends on the teller of the tale.
  
• Delericho: In life, Delericho was an Archmage of the school of Abjuration. He was always noted for his paranoia, and with good reason - his list of enemies was long, and his every effort to shorten the list only served to multiply it. Eventually, Delericho was slain by a vampire lord he had offended... and reborn as one of the undead himself. Fortunately for him, one of the wards he maintained prevented him from falling to any sort of compulsion, and so he was able to destroy his sire in short order. Delericho is believed to remain active to this day, ever attempting to chart a return to life.
  
• Drachias: Before he became a demigod, and then rose to become God of Ambition, Drachias was a powerful archmage. His focus was on order and rulership, and he stood as an Archmage of Enchantment. Drachias was a contemporary, and some say lover, of the wizardress Alendra, although they later came to blows over his attempted apotheosis.
  
• Marna: The Lady of Stone, Marna was one of the first dwarves to embrace wizardry after the Great Awakening. She helped to guide the nascent dwarven clans to the surface, developing several powerful spells in their quest. Melira never held formal standing, but she is generally counted as one of the founders of the school of Transmutation.
  
• Mantakalasa: An ancient red dragon whose greed ran towards arcane might rather than simple gold, Mantakalasa's spells typically unleashed extreme force, and frequently her preferred element of fire. Mantakalasa adopted a human guise, in which she became a noted Archmage of Evocation. She eventually disappeared, although no record of her demise has been found.
  
• Melira: The oldest of the mages of legend, so great was Melira's influence that the moon is named for her. She was instrumental in the founding of the school of Illusion, and is formally recorded as the first Archmage of that tradition. Eventually, after several very long lives, she died. Her corpse was taken to the moon that now bears her name, and buried in a secret and unmarked location.

Behind the Curtain

Alendra, Drachias, and Mantakalasa are actually elements of Terafa from way back - two of them actually featured in a (really bad) novel I attempted to write some twenty years ago. No, you can't see it.

I named the moon Melira some years ago, but hadn't associated it with an archmage until now. I quite like that association. Likewise, the name Cavcari is one I've had floating around for a little over a decade, but haven't fully fleshed out until now. Of course, he's been part of Terafa since the start of this "Ultimates Version" effort. Marna is new.

Delericho was originally one of the major villains in the "Vampire: Rivers of Time" chronicle I ran during my university days (one of my "Big Four" campaigns). He was a vampire lord who was revealed as the sire of one of the PCs, and who eventually was slain after some years. Delericho is also the name I use online in a number of places.