Presenting the Rules

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I don't particularly want to see the new edition of D&D be set up with the traditional three-book model (PHB, DMG, MM), and the resulting 1,000 page monstrosity of a ruleset. Over on ENWorld, I've been advocating quite strongly for a one-book model - the game being presented as a single 250-ish page Core Rulebook. My argument is that if the game is so complex it cannot be presented in that space, with a decent set of options no less, then it is simply too complex, and should be simplified.

However, it's worth nothing that that is actually not my ideal presentation of an RPG. It's just that the format I would prefer is... radical.

The starting point for my preferred format is the new(ish) D&D "Red Box" - the starter set for the "Essentials" version of D&D. Great box, but in truth not a great (or even very good) product.

So, take your Red Box in hand. Now, open it up and tip out all the contents - the tokens, the battlemat, the dice, the booklets, and even that cardboard insert that exists to make it seem like the box has more in it than it actually does. With the sole exception of the dice, you can now get rid of those contents; we won't need them again.

Now...

The goal is this: it should be possible to fit everything you need for an entire campaign into the box. Rulebooks, dice, character sheets, the lot. And no, you can't put an internet-capable device in there and put the whole thing online!

Bluntly, RPGs took a wrong turn when they moved from boxed sets (waaay back in the old days) to hardback books, and those books have been growing progressively larger and more ornate ever since, bloating the games up beyond all reason. Conceptually, these are simple games - you declare what you want to do, you roll dice according to some simple rules, and get the result. Amazing how we've managed to mess that up.

So, what goes into the box?

First up, drop in the character sheets, the dice, and a pencil. That's the practical stuff out of the way.

Now, present the rules in the form of five (optionally, six) slim booklets, as follows:

• Rulebook: Presents the core mechanics for the game, followed by the rules for the "three pillars" - combat, exploration, interaction. (Since I'm writing primarily for a skilled audience, there's nothing much on adventure and campaign design here; if this were a real game, this would also have to go here.)
• Characters: Presents the rules for creating characters at the start of each tier of play, and presents each of the elements of a character (ability scores, races, classes, skills, and feats). In particular, this booklet does not present spells or equipment.
• The Armoury: Presents the equipment for the game, treasure items, magic items, and the rules for artifice. Basically, everything related to those wonderful toys.
• The Grimoire: Presents the spells, ritual magic, metamagic, rules for researching the same, and all rules associated with spellcasting.
• The Bestiary: A collection of creatures malevolent and benign.
• Setting (optional): A booklet outlining the default setting for the game.

Obviously, fitting all of that into a single box is a pretty damn tall order, especially since the game would need to be outlined up to at least 15th level in those booklets. But then, I didn't say it would be easy!

It's also worth noting that I specified that the box should include everything you need for play for those months. Obviously, people who want more should be able to add more to the game, and in particular there is considerable scope for adding miniatures and terrain, or electronic tools to help organise the game.

Flair in Combat Actions

There's quite a lot I like about 4e (no, really), but one thing I have come to really detest is the structure of the powers, and in particular the mix of At-Will, Encounter, and Daily powers. (There are also Utility powers, and powers from items, but in effect these are all examples of the above three types, and so can largely be ignored.)

Now, there's no denying that this power structure makes the game easy to play, especially for new players - when your turn comes, just look through your cards for the most suitable power, and use that.

But at the same time, it is extremely limiting. Because of the nature of the game, you are almost always best off using one of your fixed powers, rather than going "off-book". And after just a few combats it becomes obvious how to "game the system" - in general, the best thing to do is to start a combat by using your most powerful Encounter power, then work down the Encounter powers until you run out, and then switch to At-Will powers. For the final fight of the session (which you can predict, because a combat lasts a near-uniform hour), instead break out your Daily powers.

Amazingly, a game that has in excess of 9,000 powers in 'print' feels incredibly samey after just a few combats!

Now, that's not to say that 3e is significantly better. In that edition, for warrior-types at least, the optimal strategy is usually to move into a good position, and then proceed to full attack every round. The game does have various combat moves, but unless you have built your character specifically to use one (and only one) of them, they're not worth bothering with. And if you have built your character specially, then the optimum approach is always to just use that one single move above all others.

Yawn.

Ultimately, what I want is a system where any given character can perform a wide range of actions, and can generally try most of their tricks at will, where the character is encouraged to describe their action a bit better than "I full attack. Again", and where the character is expected to apply a bit of variety to their action.

At the moment, I'm noodling about with a "Descriptor" system, whereby at character creation the character would pick a number of descriptors for his character, describing his broad combat style: Two-weapon, Dirty Tricks, Berserker, Formal Training, etc...

When the character's action comes up, the player thus describes his action, with relation to his descriptors.

For example, Legolas would probably have the "archer", "multiple targets" and "focussed attack" combat descriptors, and the "acrobatic" movement descriptor. "On my turn, I'll climb up the arrows embedded in the dire elephant's hide (acrobatic), all the while firing at the soldiers in the howdah on top (multiple attacks, archer). When I reach the head, I'll put three arrows in my bow, and fire them directly into the creature's brain! (focussed attack)"

(To which Gimli's player will be shocked. "How many actions is that?" he might demand. To which Legolas' player would probably shrug. "It still only counts as one.")

Meanwhile, actions would be measured along a handful of metrics: Power (Damage), Accuracy, Defense, Special Effect. Characters would have a rating in each of these, each with a range associated (and with a minimum and maximum score determined by their level).

Having declared the action, the player will assign points to each of the four metrics to determine how his attack should be resolved - does he get a bonus to hit, does he do extra damage, does it leave him off-guard, or does it have some special effect?

And so, Legolas' attack would have a Special Effect (multiple targets), and do lots and lots of damage (focussed attack).

Now, as for the bit about encouraging players to actually describe their actions with some flair and variety, I would propose a "The Gods Yawn!" rule.

Under this rule, if the player describes his action using only his descriptors ("I fire my bow at all those targets, using focussed attack to get maximum damage!"), or if he just uses the same attack over and over again, then the DM (or the collective of the other players) can declare "The Gods Yawn!"

In such a case, the offending player is still allowed his action, and makes his attack roll as normal. However, as a sign of divine displeasure, if his attack succeeds it instead becomes a Glancing Blow, automatically having the minimum possible effect.

(So, if Legolas' attack would normally do a mighty 10d6, then when The Gods Yawn, the attack instead does 10 damage.)

There are obviously a lot of things still to work out with this system - balance for one, and how it all ties up with things like spellcasting for another. However, I think it represents the approach I'll be taking with Nutshell Fantasy once I get onto the powers subsystem.

Luke Skywalker

I'm a huge fan of the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG. In my opinion, it's the first version of the game to get all the key elements right - it handles space combat reasonably well, and it models the Jedi and their powers reasonably well also. It's certainly not perfect, but my view is that it is both the best Star Wars RPG to date and the best iteration of the d20 system ever done by WotC.

That said, there is something about it that has been bugging me. Actually, it's been bothering me for quite some time, but it really came to my attention when recently creating characters for a one-shot game featuring some 'famous faces'.

Luke Skywalker.

Here's the thing: if you sit down to play a Star Wars game with a bunch of new players, and ask them what sort of character they want to play, they'll most likely start talking about the movie characters: Han Solo, Boba Fett, or whoever. That's fair enough.

Of course, it's usually the case in RPGs that you don't portray the 'famous faces', but it's likely you'll have players who want to play a character like these characters. Certainly, they'll want to play characters comparable to the famous faces.

Except that you can't.

If you take a look at the stats given for practically any of the 'famous faces' from the films (or novels, or computer games), you'll see that they have high ability scores right across the board. Luke Skywalker has several exceptional ability scores, and absolutely none that are below average.

If you take the standard character creation methods for Organised Play (the ones the designers recommend), you'll find that it is impossible to recreate Luke Skywalker as he stands at the start of Star Wars - the stats are just too high. (It is possible using random rolls, but only in the event of freakish good luck.)

But surely Luke Skywalker, as he stands at the start of Star Wars, is precisely the sort of first level character the game should be supporting?

Of course, it's most notable with Star Wars, but a very similar issue crops up in many other places. If you look at the stats given for Drizzt in D&D 3e, or even the older stats for Conan, the Gray Mouser, and other 'famous faces' that D&D is supposed to emulate, you'll see that these are similarly a mass of impossibly high ability scores, and often made up of blatantly broken rules because the RAW just doesn't do the job.

But, again, D&D is designed to emulate the exploits of these characters - surely it should be doing a better job of modelling them?

I think what's going wrong is that when the designers come to stat up the 'famous faces' they're treating them with extreme reverence, which leads them to amplify the good and minimise the bad aspects of the characters. And, actually, you see the same with the Star Wars novels - where Han Solo has gone from being a cocky and competent smuggler to now being the guy who graduated top of his class at the Imperial academy, a legendary general, and all-around tech expert. Luke, meanwhile, has now become the ultimate Jedi Grand Master, with wisdom and power that Yoda could barely dream of.

(And, yeah, there are aspects of all of this in the films. But the characters there are hardly all-powerful. In RotJ, Han is shown to be rather poor at stealth and at tech skills, while his abilities as a general are sufficient that he needs bailed out by Ewoks. Luke, meanwhile, is only able to finally defeat Vader by calling on the Dark Side.)

I'm not trying to denigrate the 'famous faces' here. However, I'm inclined to think that they should not be put on a pedastal by the games designed to emulate their adventures. So, when presenting stats for these characters, the games really should present them in such a way that the PCs could eventually hope to grow to rival them. And that means you absolutely should be able to create a "first level version" of those characters without relying on freakish good luck to achieve it.

Thoughts?

Despairing of Fifth Edition

I came to the realisation last week that there is almost no chance of Wizards of the Coast producing a fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons that actually suits me. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it is impossible for them to do so.

See, three things are true:

1. In order to justify keeping the line going and employing staff, they have to keep regularly publishing books.
2. In order to justify publishing any given book, they need to be reasonably sure that it will sell a certain number of units.
3. The books most likely to sell the required number of units are the very 'crunch-heavy' "Player's Option" books - splatbooks for the various classes; compilations of new spells, powers, and magic items; and the like. Monster books, to a certain point, are also reliable sellers. But DM guides, setting books, and (especially) adventures are not.

The upshot of this, of course, is that in order for D&D to be successful in the long-term, it must be structured in such a way as to maximise the scope for advancement with lots of these "Player's Options" books. It is all-but-certain that fifth edition will see a "Complete Fighter's Handbook", "Sword and Fist", "Complete Warrior", or "Martial Power". Indeed, it will most likely see several of these.

And, indeed, that is on top of the likely three-book core ruleset, which will thus be another 1,000 page monstrosity. (In fairness... 3.5e is only 960 pages long in the core, and 4e 832 pages)

D&D is, and inevitably will remain, an extremely rules- and option-heavy game.

Conversely, what I want from the game is a much light, more fluid, and more elegant system. Personally, I'm inclined to think that if the core rules can't fit in a single 250-ish page rulebook, they're too long. (Star Wars Saga Edition manages it. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition manages it. Vampire: the Masquerade, Mutants & Masterminds, and Shadowrun all manage it...)

Additionally, I would very much prefer there to be a reasonable, but reasonably small, set of supplements, each fairly meaty, providing the complete system. (Again, SWSE does well, with about a dozen supplements. WRFP 2nd Edition has about 20 books, about a quarter of which are adventures.)

Get in, do what you want to do with the game, and then get out.

Of course, the model I've outlined probably gives scope for about three years of published material, with print runs inevitably declining as the line goes on. In terms of being able to actually make a (sufficient) profit on the game, and keeping a team busy working on it, it's very likely doomed to failure.

(And I don't think D&D can afford to go for sixth edition in three years' time. Frankly, fifth edition has come too soon. Indeed, if you count 3.5e and Essentials as significant revisions - as I do - then this is the fifth significant new version that WotC have published in 13 years. You can only go back to the well so many times, especially since nobody needs a new edition, ever - those 3.0e books I got 13 years ago are still perfectly usable!)

It is, of course, possible that I've misjudged the situation. WotC may have a grand master-plan, whereby they can structure the game in 'modules', and thus make sufficient profit while avoiding bloating the game. But I frankly don't believe it - in order to make profit, the books must sell, and if they're selling and being used, they contribute to bloating the game.

Hail and Well Met!

So, this is my new RPG-related blog. And, of course, this is the obligatory "what this blog is about" post...

I've actually been blogging for a long time. My main blog is found over on Part Four, and is nearing 1,000 posts. But my first blog was actually RPG related, being the now-long-defunct Rulelawyers blog. So, I'm a bit of an old hand when it comes to blogging. Of course, that means I'm now more or less repeating myself...

(Why a new blog? Well, the major reason is that I don't really want to resurrect Rulelawyers, but I'm also aware that my regular readers over on Part Four are mostly non-gamers, and so don't really want to inflict endless posts on the topic on them. That said, if this post quickly becomes a content void, I'll probably shut it down and port any posts across.)

This blog is going to be about RPGs, and about anything and everything that I feel like saying about them. Unlike Brindy, therefore, it almost certainly have a whole bunch of rants on various topics, and may well venture into Edition Wars territory. It's also very likely that I'll end up posting reviews and retrospectives of many of the games I run, especially one-shots. (I almost certainly won't be doing reviews of games run by other Game Masters - that would probably be extremely rude!)

But the major thing I'm really interested in is "making things better". I'm intrigued with the means by which one could build a better game, build a better adventure, build a better setting... or just become a better GM. Therefore, I hope to spend quite a lot of my time here musing about such things.

Finally, the inevitable disclaimer: I intend to be pretty forthright with my opinions, and to say what I mean without too much messing about. And I've been known to be less-than-tactful on occasion. So, it's possible that something here may well offend. If so, I'm sorry that that's the case, and assure you it wasn't my intention to offend you. (Doesn't mean I won't do it, right enough, nor even that I would choose to say something else even knowing it would cause offense!)

However, sometimes they do things right

In an effort to redress the balance after my most recent rant about Wizards of the Coast's advice on running games, here's a comment on something that they've done that isn't just right, but is a major benefit for the harried DM.

I got the new mega-adventure "Red Hand of Doom" yesterday. It's a fun-looking adventure for characters of leels 5-10 (or perhaps 6-12 - the book's a bit unclear on that). However, I've not yet read it.

The thing that the book does that's really useful, though, is to collect the monster stats at the back of the book (and, I'm led to believe there will be an online document giving those same stats in .pdf form). Since this includes lots of different versions of hobgoblin tribesmen for various levels and various roles, this segment of the adventure book has utility far beyond "Red Hand of Doom" itself.

This is the second time Wizards have done this recently. I also got "Sons of Gruumsh" at Christmas, and it does the same thing for Orcish warriors. Again, very useful.

(I would really like Wizards to do a monster book akin to Draconomicon for the classic humanoid races, but I suspect they won't. The major utility of such a book, frankly, would be the sample statistics for lots of different representatives of the races, something that's rather lacking, and something that would make the DM's job a lot easier.)

So, the upshot: well done, Wizards.

Sometimes I wonder...

I posted once before about a comment in "Complete Arcane", which basically said that if a player comes out with a character concept, the DM should find a way to allow the player to play said character. On the Wizards website, they've just posted an articule entitled "Sibling Rivalry", which expresses much the same sentiment.

Essentially, the argument comes down to this: the DM painstakingly crafts a world and a campaign to sit in that world, and then a player develops a character concept that just doesn't fit. The example given is of a half-dragon psioncist in a world that features the introduction of arcane magic to the world (and makes no mention of psionics). The 'correct' response is for the DM to widen the scope of his world, because the player absolutely has the right to play any character he wants.

(What's worse is that the DM in the example complains that he doesn't want to learn all the psionic rules, to which the player replies that he'll handle that for the DM. Presumably, no-one at Wizards of the Coast has ever played with a munchkin rules-lawyer, or they'd know why that's not a good idea - the DM has to know the rules at least as well as such a player, or the game will fail.)

However, that's not really my issue with the 'advice'. The problem is that some character concepts just don't work with some campaigns and some settings. If I tell the players I'm doing a campaign which is a D&D/Cthulhu crossover, they should know that there's no way of fitting a kender ninja into the mix. It just won't go, and there's no way to bend the two together without horribly mangling the campaign.

Now, this isn't a call for absolute authority on the part of DMs. Nor is it a claim that the players are always in the wrong. Ideally, the DM shouldn't craft a campaign in such detail that only a very small range of characters will fit, and he should certainly discuss character concepts long before the point of contention is reached.

It's a question of personal responsibility. The DM is absolutely entitled to develop any campaign he desires, and is absolutely entitled to allow or disallow any concept he desires for any reason whatsoever. The DM is also absolutely entitled to find that he has no players.

What the DM should do is say something along the lines of "I'm working on this campaign... Interested?" The players can then say, "Go for it!" or "Ick, no!" And, at that point, the problem goes away.

Of course, now I really want to run a game featuring kender ninja vs. Cthulhu!