5e and "The Force Awakens"

Each time I re-watch it, I find myself less and less enamoured with "The Force Awakens" - the first time was a joy, the second time I started seeing some flaws, by the third I'd pinned down the arrival of Han Solo as the point where it starts to run out of steam, and now it's... well, it's still good, but it's basically "Star Wars Greatest Hits", and the originals are clearly better. (That said, there's no reason Episode VIII shouldn't be better.)

The reason I mention this here is that as time passes my impressions of 5e start to fall into the same mold - I was initially very impressed (with the finished product), but as time has gone on I've become less and less enamoured of it, and more and more convinced of the flaws.

But another similarity is that I'm inclined to think that a very large part of the positive reaction to both 5e and TFA is due to what they are not - TFA was a massive relief after the relative failure of the prequels, while 5e was likewise a massive relief after the negativity surrounding 4e. And, as such, many of the weaknesses and failings get a pass simply because they represent a step away from what has gone before.

Either that, or I'm just getting old and curmudgeonly.

But here's a question to finish on: I wonder when we'll see D&D's equivalent of "Rogue One"? Preferably complete with CGI recreations of Gygax and Arneson...

Back to that Star Wars game

Having considered the matter some more, I have decided that the Star Wars mini-campaign should probably be stripped down quite considerably - better to structure it as a one-shot, use pregen characters, and see how it goes. Then, if the game is a roaring success I can consider investing the resources in a full campaign, and if it fails to take off then I've not invested too much time and effort.

Additionally, I have concluded that the ruleset I will use is the Star Wars d6 Second Edition rulebook with no supplements, largely because that's the book that I actually own. If I do go for a full campaign, I'll probably want to 'upgrade' to something more recent and/or investigate sourcebooks, but for now it's better to stick with a manageable amount of reading and stick to physical books.

Finally, I've refined my concept for the game quite a bit - I'm now looking at a mash-up of "Unforgiven" with "Casablanca"... or, rather, a mash-up of my half-remembered versions of these.

The Things You Care About

One of the great unfulfilled promises of 5th Edition was the hope for a "modular game". Originally, this was sold as part of the "unify the editions" strategy, allowing players of all the different editions to come together around a common core, with 1st Ed players picking up a "classic module", 4e players picking up a "tactical combat module", and so on. It was never clear if the intention was for people to be able to play different 'editions' while at the same table, but it proved to be a moot point anyway since none of that meaningfully came to pass.

That said, I'm never sure that was a realistic aim anyway. I would have thought that a group that wanted to play 1st Ed would be better off just playing 1st Edition, and I suspect the "different games at the same table" would have been a nightmare.

However, one area where the modular design could have been really helpful would have been in allowing people to emphasise different bits of the game depending on what they individually care about. Of course, some of this has always existed, in that players who cared about having, say, a code of conduct could pick the Paladin class, while those who enjoyed magic could pick the Wizard, and so on. (And, of course, the use of supplements could allow the group to expand the game in some directions rather than others.)

And that worked to an extent... but only to an extent, because unfortunately there were almost invariably power imbalances between the options (Wizards beat Paladins in just about every edition of the game), and also because those expansions were generally done symmetrically - if the Fighter wanted a lovingly detailed weapon list and set of combat maneuvers, everyone was thereafter forced to use that same set.

But a modular design probably gives some scope to skipping that - if the Fighter wants the detailed weapons, maybe he could have access to those while everyone else just uses "hand weapon", "great weapon", etc. Meanwhile, the Wizard gets to use the detailed spell lists and components, while nobody else has to bother. And as long as everybody interfaces with the core system (used by the DM) in the same way, everything should remain fine.

Or not. Maybe it's a pipe dream.

But it does seem like something that would be worth investigating - rather than a 300-page core rulebook that's shared by everyone, where fully a third is spells that are of no use to lots of players while the weapon list is too detailed for some and not detailed enough for others, maybe it is indeed best to have a very thin core game, coupled with a set of modules (potentially associated with the classes), where the player picks up only those modules they care about, and ignore the rest.

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.)