How is This Still a Product?

Wizards of the Coast have just announced that on the 20th of June they're going to release official character sheets for 5th Edition.

This makes me want to throw things. Official character sheets are one of those products that should have ceased to exist years ago - if you have access to the internet and a printer, you have no need of this product, and should have no desire to be ripped off by it. And if you don't have access to either the internet or a printer, then frankly you have bigger problems than needing a printed sheet for your D&D character.

It's not even as if WotC are particularly adept at producing character sheets - the current official sheet (from the PHB or their website) is barely adequate, and it's not significantly worse than most of their previous efforts. I guess 2nd Edition might have had decent official sheets... but then, that was TSR, not WotC (and, honestly, I doubt it anyway).

Nor can these official sheets be meaningfully considered 'more convenient' than downloading and printing a set at home. To get the official sheets you either have to go to the store to get them, inevitably taking time, or you have to wait for them to be delivered. Whereas 'download and print' takes a few minutes at most, and then you have the sheets in-hand. And even that's assuming you just print out the sheet, rather than using some sort of fillable form... or even better, using an electronic form on a phone or tablet. That is, it's inferior not only to modern technology, not even to last decade's technology, but to technology available at the end of last century. (Amazon started in 1994.)

Seriously, official pre-printed character sheets are probably the single worst standard product any RPG producer might offer. Only official dice match them in the "bad product" stakes - and, again, because those tend to be a bog-standard set of the seven polyhedrals with nothing special about them at all, and which aren't even provided in mixed colours to make them easy to tell apart. You're paying a premium for the brand-logo on the box, and nothing else; you can get a better set of similar dice for less money from the exact same vendors who supply your 'official' dice.

(Official dice that are in some way customised are somewhat exempt from this particular sub-rant... but only somewhat. Because sticking an image on Cthulhu on a set of dice does add at least a quantum of interest to the set, which might just be worth spending money on if you have plenty to spare. A standard set of polyhedrals with a 20% markup for having the D&D logo on the box, not so much.)

Classes for Settings

As we know, D&D is a game of archetypes. This is the basis of the class system, and is a feature not a bug - sure, there are distinct limitations of forcing everyone into a class, and other systems therefore have some advantages, but it is what it is.

To a certain extent, the game has embraced archetypes in other areas of the design. This is most apparent in 4e's monster design (probably the best presentation of monsters to date), with their various roles.

However, I'm inclined to think that the game would be well-served to embrace those archetypes rather more fully in other areas. As such, I'm leaning towards the notion that magic items should essentially be divided based on their power sources (as I've discussed in another post), with some sources allowing items to do some things that other sources just can't. And I've likewise mentioned that NPCs should probably be built using some form of personality archetypes as well.

For settings, then, I think I'd be inclined to suggest that the game should also embrace archetypes. Specifically, each setting should have a major archetype (jungle, desert, dungeon, urban...), then a sub-archetype (caves, lair, tomb, temple...), and finally one or two customisation elements - much as characters have a class, sub-class, and feats.

Each of these would then alter one or more aspects of game play in that setting. So in the jungle your main issue might be the extreme humidity while in the desert it's the lack of water that's a problem. Tombs should generally play out rather differently to simple cave networks, and so on.

There's a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, by making each environment fairly simple (one effect each for archetype, sub-archetype, and customisation), and making it easy to summarise these, the game makes it more likely that those environmental effects get moved into the foreground, rather than just being yet another bit of background noise that gets ignored (like encumbrance).

Secondly, by typing the effects into archetypes, the game creates a consistent feel - all dungeons have some things in common, while all urban environments have some other things in common.

And, thirdly, it means that as the heroes move from one environment to another, the game shift with them - sure, those effects may not be much, but if the jungle is distinctly different from the dungeons, then when the heroes stop hacking though the jungle and instead enter the Lost Temple, it feels like they've gone from the one to the other.

Of course, that would necessitate adjusting the presentation of the DMG to bring together these archetypes, but that's probably no bad thing - at present, all that information already exists but largely goes unused because it gets filed under Major Boring Shit. At worst, this approach makes no difference to that.

Or maybe it just doesn't work. Who knows?

Left Behind

One of these days, I'm going to have to cancel my subscription to the Pathfinder Adventure Path product.

The thing is, after ten years of receiving two full campaigns per year, I now have more material than I will ever use. Furthermore, not only am I highly unlikely ever to use any of these Paths (good though they are), I'm long since at a point where it would actually be really hard to do so - as time has gone on, Pathfinder has exploded way beyond the original offering, to the point where it's almost unrecognisable, and to the point where I can't claim to have any meaningful expertise with the system. It would be like trying to run Windows 10 on a 486 processor - technically the framework should be similar enough to make them compatible-ish, but in practice it just won't work at all.

So I've reached a point where I'm actually just getting them to read, not to play, and they're not that good.

Maybe when they announce Pathfinder 2nd Edition, that's the time to give it up - surely it can't be that far away? (Or, maybe when they announce Pathfinder 2nd Edition, that should be the point where I hop back onto that game big-time, and stay current?)

Funnily enough, we're also just about to get to the point where I'm left behind on D&D 5th Edition as well. With the end of the "Dust to Dust" campaign, I'm no longer actively using the system and that, coupled with my having left ENWorld, has seen my interest in the system starting to wane sharply. And the upcoming "Tales from the Yawning Portal" will mark the point where I stop buying the official adventures (unless and until they do an Eberron product) - meaning that the upcoming Major Rules Expansion is the only 5e product on the horizon I'm actually interested in.

(And more even that than: because the "Firefly" RPG appears to have come to its end, there are no current games that I am following. "N.E.W." was okay, but didn't inspire me to immediately go out and run some games, and "O.L.D." is unlikely to do so either, that being the only other RPG product I'm sure to get this year. Which just leaves the upcoming "Star Trek" game as a 'maybe', which actually means "probably not".)

And so I suddenly find myself being left behind by RPGs entirely. I'm not sure if that's just another short-term malaise, or if this is finally the end of the road. Either way, that's why things have been, and are unlikely to remain, fairly quiet around here.

Better Player #5: Once Upon a Time, There Was a Little Sausage Called Baldrick...

As we know, a great many people play RPGs to win. And that's fine - despite them generally not being fixed, it is nonetheless true that almost all RPGs have some sort of goal or win condition: you want to complete the adventure, or you want to level up, or whatever. Even a totally plotless dungeon crawl is motivated by the "kill things and take their stuff" approach - where the goal is XP and GP.

But this can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding: that an RPG should be a basic power-fantasy and that nothing bad should ever happen to your character.

And so, the PC is carefully crafted to have no weaknesses, to be immune to all attacks, or have a super-high AC, or whatever else.

But this post isn't about that.

This post is about the other thing that tends to happen: the PC who has the carefully crafted background so that he has absolutely no ties to anything. In the extreme case, he's an amnesiac orphan with absolutely no ties to anything or anybody. Because if the character has any ties, the GM can and will use those ties to attack the character and, by extension, the player.

(And, in fairness, there's no shortage of GM's who will do precisely that, and will do it precisely to get at the player. Unfortunately, player and GM pathologies seldom come about in isolation - they usually feed on one another.)

The big problem with the amnesiac orphan, though, is the problem with Baldrick's story in "Blackadder". (For those who don't know: "Once upon a time, there was a little sausage called Baldrick, and he lived happily ever after." Also, shame on you!)

The problem is this: the character has no motivation, which means nothing ever happens, which means it's just dull.

For the sake of a good story, it's really rather better if the PC does have those ties. Because those ties provide motivation, and that motivation gets the character moving and on to his adventures. Better still, with those motives in place, the adventures are personal - they reflect something about the character, which makes for more involved play and better storytelling.

And that's why Wolverine, who is in fact literally an amnesiac orphan, is very quickly linked up with Rogue, who he takes under his wing, then to Jean Grey (love interest), Cyclops (romantic rival), and Professor X (father figure) - five ties that then serve to drive the character's story forward.

(And, indeed, in the otherwise-poor "X-Men Origins: Wolverine", he's tied further to a brother, several friends in a mercenary crew, and Striker. It's the same deal - give the character ties to give the character motivations, in order to drive the story.)

Ultimately, though, I think this is about mindset. As I noted above, one of the reasons for avoiding those ties is the fear that the GM may use those ties to attack the character, and by extension the player.

But I think this is a case where it's actually best to draw a bright dividing line between the two. This is a case where, for the benefit of the player, we probably want bad things to happen to the character. Indeed, those bad things aren't an attack on the player; they're better thought of as being the character being "charged up", all ready to spring into action and do cool stuff.

(There is, of course, a corollary to this: the GM should be sure to target those "bad things" in such a way that they do charge up the character, rather than knocking him down. "The bad guy has grafted adamantium plating on to all your bones" is rather better in this regard than "the bad guy has chopped all your limbs off, and now you are helpless"! As I said, GM and player pathologies tend to grow together.)

So, then, my advice for the "better player" would be to make sure to pay some attention to what can and does motivate your character to adventure: is it ties to one or more NPCs? Is it some principle that the character just can't let lie? Something else? (Ideally, your character would have several possible motivations. But, really, it comes down to this: the question "why should I go on this adventure?" should always have an answer.)

A Star Wars Mini-Campaign: By the Numbers

I'm in the process of noodling through some ideas for a Star Wars d6 mini-campaign. This may or may not happen, and as a consequence I won't be putting up any spoilers here for the time being. However, I have a few ideas, so here goes:

Three parts, three sessions each, four acts each: The mini-campaign is expected to be a trilogy of adventures, where each adventure is split into three sessions (though I'm not sure if these should be 'regular' 3-hour sessions or extended 6-hour 'weekend' sessions). And, as is my wont, each session would be split into four acts: introduction, rising action to the midpoint, falling action, denouement.

Three set-pieces: In addition, it's quite noticable that each of the Star Wars films has three big action scenes of varying scope. This ties in very nicely to my 3x3 structure, in that it strongly suggests that each session should be built around one of those action sequences.

On the PCs: four humans, one alien, one droid, one Force-sensitive but zero Jedi. The game is intentionally taking significant influence from "Rogue One" (hence the d6 system), which means focussing very much on the Rebellion, but also avoiding turning it into another episode of the "Jedi soap-opera".

(But that does leave me in a quandary: this all 'feels' like it should have pre-generated characters supplied, but I'm very much of the opinion that campaigns should allow players to create their own characters - pre-gens are best reserved for one-shot games. Which obviously is something of a contradiction. I'll need to think on this some more - a one-shot might be a better idea anyway, or maybe I can start with a char-gen session. But either way, I'm pretty sure on the "no more than one alien, one droid, one Force-sensitive, and no Jedi" thing.)

Seven locations: each of the three parts will make use of three locations, ideally being two planets and one space-based. However, one of the features of a trilogy is that the third part should revisit many of the themes and conflicts introduced in the first part, which means revisiting some of the locations. Consequently, part one would use three distinct locations, part two a further three distinct locations, and then part three would open with one new location but then return to locations visited in part one.

And that's where I am right now. In future posts I may flesh out some more of the details, or I may start presenting the character profiles for the pre-gens. (Though, first, I need to resolve that "one-shot with pre-gens, or campaign with custom characters" question!)

Slaying a Sacred Cow: No Character Advancement?

One of the great innovations of D&D is the level system, and especially the way the game advances in nice, big steps. This is a huge boon to new players, in particular, because it provides an immediate and obvious motivation for playing - you adventure to level up.

Of course, it's all a bit circular, since the big advantage of levelling up is that you can then go on tougher adventures in order to level up again, in order to go on tougher adventures, in order...

(The same is true of treasure, as well - you get magic items to make your character better so you can face tougher challenges to get better magic items.)

However, in a great many of the stories the game is emulating, characters don't really advance in anything like this manner. Yes, Luke Skywalker goes through the Hero's Journey and is vastly more powerful at the end of RotJ than at the start of SW (none of this "A New Hope" nonsense for me!). But the same isn't true of Han, Leia, Chewie, Wedge, or the others. Likewise, in "The Matrix", Neo gets advanced training to go from newbie to The One, but Morpheus and Trinity don't. And there are plenty of other examples.

So I'm wondering if many campaigns shouldn't just ditch character advancement entirely. Start the characters at 5th level (or whatever), and leave them there for the duration. (Even better in non-level-based systems, of course.) You'd probably need some sort of mechanism for tweaking the character over time, to allow for changes in focus, retraining, and the like, but these could simply be a matter of rearranging skills rather than adding them (because there are only so many hours in the day, and unused skills become rusty - spending hours training with weights will increase Strength, but it means you're not spending hours practicing Spanish and so that skill will fade).

I certainly wouldn't recommend this for every campaign, and I probably wouldn't even recommend a game omit character advancement entirely. But for some campaigns and some systems, it may be just the thing - strip out one more unneeded complication.

Proposed House Rule: A Fixed DC

I've been gradually coming around to the notion that D&D, and especially 5e, should use a fixed DC for all skill checks. Obviously, this wouldn't include attack rolls, saving throws, or most other combat-related rolls, but for skill checks, and especially non-combat skill checks, I think it's worth considering.

The reason for this is that, looking back, I'm not convinced my assessment of appropriate DCs hasn't been significantly influenced by the capability of the PCs under question - with better PCs facing a higher DC than a less-skilled PC would for the same challenge. In which case, as in much of 4e, you have a whole host of benefits and upgrades, and the associated rules... that then boil down to "roll a 10 or more".

So I'm leaning to a simpler assessment of difficulty, in that the DM would ask the question, "can this be done?" There would be three answers:

Yes, of course! If the task is trivially easy, such that anyone remotely capable could do it, no roll is necessary - success is automatic.
• No, that's impossible. Conversely, if the task is simply not possible, no roll is necessary - success is impossible.
• Maybe. In the third case, roll against a fixed DC of 15.

The big advantages of this is that it's a somewhat more objective judge of difficulty (no modifying DCs to suit), and it's obviously faster than having an extra step of asking the DC. On the other hand, it doesn't have much scope for tasks of different difficulty.

Except...

The rules do have one other tool for affecting difficulty: dis/advantage. If the situation is such that the task is much harder than normal, but not impossible, then disadvantage can be applied. Likewise, if the situation is such that it's much easier than normal, apply advantage. Job done.

(I'm further inclined to think that everything else should be handled by the character's innate abilities, with no "circumstantial bonuses" or the like. Especially since such bonuses don't work at all well with dis/advantage.)

One other thing: I'm inclined to also include some notion of extraordinary success, where the roll hits 20, 25, or higher. For some tasks, notably things like knowledge checks, it may be worth adding graduated results for better rolls. But, even so, I'd leave the basic success level at DC 15, with each step above that giving some additional benefit, rather than changing the DC itself.

(This does also mean that things like knowledge skills should probably be restricted to general "what do I know about...?" questions, rather than specifics - otherwise, those specifics would tie the DM into the fixed DC of 15!)

I'll need to give this one a go to see how it plays before making any solid decision on it, though.