Wargaming Roots: Wargame Complexity

A fun little snip on the design of the Tunnels and Trolls Adventures mobile game's "about" page strikes an interesting point here about the development of pen-and-paper games and the hobby's wargaming roots:

In 1975, as role-playing games were beginning their rise to popularity among the gaming community, Ken St. Andre found himself dissatisfied by the complexity and inaccessibility which rules systems of other games presented newcomers to the genre. Seeking a game with which to introduce his friends to the world of interactive storytelling, Ken set out to create a lighter and more flexible rules system which would provide players with greater latitude for heroic feats. He did away with the often times dauntingly complex stat sheets and tables found in the wargames from which the first RPG was descended, and created a game more inspired by the deeds of comic book superheroes. Ultimately, Ken named his game Tunnels & Trolls.

We have come a long way from the Chainmail "wargame" style rules to a more player-focused and I feel accessible B/X style, and then from there I feel we went deep into the wargaming side of the hobby again with D&D 3rd and 3.5 Edition, Pathfinder, D&D 4, and then D&D 5. Our wargame roots are clearly on display and this has spawned an entire group of games these days that are more accessibility focused than complex wargame focused.

More Complex These Days?

In some ways, I feel we are way beyond the complexity of the 1970's wargame-roots games, especially with Pathfinder, D&D 4, and software like Hero Lab. D&D 5 I feel took a step back from the abyss, but I still feel the older B/X games and their clones do a better job at controlling complexity and focusing the action more on the adventure rather than the character.

Some products make me smile, like the Pathfinder Strategy Guide, a great book that tries to tamp down the complexity of the base game, explain things to beginners, and make a complex system easy to use. But really, when I think about it, I get this feeling if the effort were put into making the system easier and not needing a book like this would be a more laudable goal. Games that are simple and accessible to beginners do not need how-to books.

Part of me likes the complicated game though, and there are fans of this hyper-detailed genre of gaming, again, hearkening back to our wargaming roots and having detailed World War II wargmaes with rules for jammed turret rings, smoke capacity, the ammunition capacity and depression limits of of bow-mounted tank machineguns. I have played wargames like those, and while the one or two times that level of detail comes up in a 6-hour game you may be happy to have these rules, more often than not I find rules like this slow the game down more than they do add value.

I feel the same with detailed character generation systems. Our tendency as designers is to add more, to make options for every possible character type and background, and through universal inclusivity we weigh the system down so much we end up needing multiple pages for one character. Genesys requires three sides of paper for each character, and that has hurt our desire to play what should have been a simple storytelling game. Pathfinder, the king of complexity, requires Hero Lab these days, and it is not uncommon for us to be printing out six to twelve sides of paper for each character.

Less is More

And I look at the single-sided one-page character sheets of Labyrinth Lord and other B/X games and I see a lot of wasted space, and that is a good thing. I could do a B/X character on a quarter sheet of paper and put four to a side and still have plenty of room. Back in old-school Traveller we put one character on two lines of a sheet of notebook paper.

We still had fun with those games because we ran fun adventures and we didn't need detailed character essays for each player to pour over. I get this strange feeling at times that games use complexity to drive interest these days, that somehow a detailed character generation system makes up for a lack of compelling adventures and stories. That is really an unfair statement for many games, but I see so many games that are 90% character creation systems and then assume everything else, story, adventure, and how to have fun comes for free.

I would rather play a game that was 10% character creation and 90% story and background. Call of Cthulhu and Dragon Age are good examples of modern pen-and-paper games that minimize the game rules while maximizing story content and background information. I would put T&T in this category as well, especially with the incredible world-book in the Tunnels and Trolls Deluxe Edition in the latest version of the rules.

B/X and Labyrinth Lord? These are more giant toyboxes with 10% character design and the rest of the 90% are monster, spell, and magic item lists. That toybox content is the story and background. There are times when I like this, since I make my own stories and worlds anyways, and other times when I miss having that world and story to play through (and save me the work).

How far off are the more modern games from the toybox model? It is a bit tougher to judge I feel, since you have a good portion of these games tied up in character design and it grows in size the more books you add to the system. My generic rule is: if a computer program makes character creation easy and error free, the character design system is heavy. If it takes me more than 5 minutes and a sheet of paper to design a character that is too long.

If you need to pass a book around the table for players to design characters you have dependencies in there that should be streamlined onto the character sheet (or eliminated from the game). If I play Pathfinder with a group again I would love to have class-specific character sheets, one for paladins, one for rogues, and so on...

Everything to Everybody?

It brings to mind the question, "How much character design do you need to tell a story?" There is a point where there is too much, where you are making a feat to cover a bonus to every possible action and interaction, such as a feat that allows you to call a truce during combat. These sorts of feats rub me the wrong way in two ways: this is codifying roleplaying and creativity, and you are adding unneeded complexity to the character design system. Without this feat...you can't roleplay this? When I am refereeing the game it becomes another added "thing I have to remember" in order to play when the one character in a thousand's player actually bought this feat and expects it to come into play.

In T&T or B/X? Hell, make a CHR saving roll or roll under Charisma at a minus whatever and we are done. In most every other game it is an ability score roll, the current situation, and referee judgment. Done.

In the 1970's wargames there was this tendency to start simple, and then balloon complexity with each new expansion and revision. Track performance in taiga and mud for armored vehicles. Fuel performance and ambient temperature. Snowshoe size versus snow type. Curvature of the Earth and muzzle velocity of off-board artillery. Most of the rules had some historical event behind them and they probably affected the outcome of some real-world battle somewhere...but there is a point where enough is enough.

If I equip my desert soldiers with snowshoes does that give them a movement bonus? If my winter partisans carry large desert water packs at what point do those freeze? Do I need a table for that?

And the more complicated wargame goes in the closet and the new game that was designed for fast and fun play goes on the table. That is where I am with Pathfinder. Completely bought in with both books and Hero Lab and we never play it really all that much. Great customers and lousy players.

Simple Games are More Fun for Me

So I come back to the old versions of games, the retro-clones, and some of the classics made back in the day where they saw this problem and designed against it. Labyrinth Lord and B/X. Tunnels and Trolls Deluxe Edition. Other classics. There are some new games, such as Savage Worlds and FATE, that attack complexity of character design versus story and those are worth mentioning too.

I see a collection of huge books for a gaming system and my reaction is, "I don't have enough time for these anymore." Instead of feeling bad I switch games that I do have the time for. I am sensing another round of boxing games up coming here soon. It is a sad thing but also a good thing, since it lets me focus on games I want to play (and it frees up space for more games, like Traveller's new edition).

My thing is, play what you love - and some people love the complexity. I have moods when I love all the detail and choices. Be happy if you can find people who love what you do and play with them. As my players dwindle and I find myself more and more alone, my tastes and needs change. I want less record keeping and design. I want solo play. I want smaller rules and tighter designs. I want more story and world, and less rules. I want attribute systems that handle many things, and less flipping through books to find a rule that handles a special case.

My tastes are changing more towards the retro-clones and classic games that I started the hobby with because those are what I love and where I find the most comfort.

The MMO Magic Item Economy and Mjölnir

The MMO-style magic-item economy has all but ruined fantasy gaming for us. D&D 4 was this high point of this insanity, where if you did not keep up with the natural 'progression' of magic items your character could not fight monsters rated at their level effectively.

Add to the fact random magic items were mostly useless for most builds, which required specific items and combinations to play effectively 'at level.'

It got so bad the game's designers suggested - in the rules - players come up with a list of magic items their characters wanted to find, and the referee should use that to award magic items from.

This was a fantasy game living in a fantasy land of insanity.

In the old days, if you found that +1 magic sword, you were set for life. It hit the check-boxes:

• Gave you a +1 to-hit and damage, check
• Could hit 'creatures only hit by silver or magic weapons', check
• Was cool, check

The invention of the +2 sword started the insanity to +3, +4, the theoretical +5 maximum best sword, and then in the 3.5-era Epic Level Handbook, went all  the way up to +20.

Well, since they have +2 swords, we need +2 armors! And the lists of magic items blew up. The game was never the same, and AD&D made a mess of the magic item charts with percentage charts of incremental and really worthless upgrades, sure a +2 sword was "even better" but it really only gave a 5% to-hit chance bonus over a +1 sword and 12% or-so extra damage given a d8 damage.

Mjölnir is not a +5 Hammer

+2 swords were epic-sounding, but they weren't superhero-level gear like Mjölnir. Even a +5 hammer didn't come close to the Mjölnir we saw in Marvel Super Heroes, and we sat there feeling D&D characters lived in a world with really weak magic weapons that really at most with +5 had a +25% chance to hit and did 50% more damage than a normal melee weapon. Big deal, but that was the best you could do in D&D.

Mjölnir in Marvel Super Heroes could take out a truck or the Hulk, your choice. Or both.

Mjölnir in an MMO is this insanely damaging 300 DPS weapon that still feels like that gray weapon you started the game with because the world scales with you and you will never truly feel epic. You can splat a level-1 with it, but really, every day you spend out there grinding it doesn't really feel epic because the game assumes you need it to keep up with the content. Sounds like D&D 4 to us, and that's what they did with every item in the game, with forced upgrades in every equipment slot. Though in D&D 4, things maxed out to a +6, and it still didn't feel like the Mjölnir we know and love.

You will find a lot of high-level magic weapons in D&D with extra powers, like lightning bolts or other spells because the plus-damage thing really doesn't make them into the weapons we expect them to be on the silver screen.

Fixed Damage Modifiers are King

But there was a reason for that +2 sword after all, despite the minor 5 to 10% upgrade. The fixed damage modifier.

In D&D 3.5 the fighter's multi-attack leveled the playing field, and the concept of multiplying stacks of fixed-damage bonuses across multi-attacks created the MMO "damage per turn" thing we have going on today in Pathfinder and D&D 5 (done in different ways). The base damage die of your weapon in D&D matters a lot less than the amount of fixed +damage modifiers you can get - because those multiply and stack up fast.

I would rather have a +2 dagger that does a d4 than a +1 swortsword that does a d6. The average damage for the dagger is 2.5 + 2 or 5 points of damage, and the sword does 3.5 + 1 or 5 points of damage. Sure I could roll higher with the sword, but that +2 is guaranteed damage every turn, multiplied across multiple attacks. With five attacks, that +2 is 10 guaranteed points of damage versus the "higher damaging" but less enchanted shortsword with 5 points of guaranteed damage - across five attacks.

You see this on five attacks per turn or five attacks across five turns. Guaranteed damage is king.

This adds up when you stack strength-enhancing magic items and high ability scores for greater fixed-damage adders, and all of a sudden you are adding +5 for STR, +3 for a weapon and you have 8 points of guaranteed damage in an attack. Always go for the higher "plus" and the dice is secondary, especially if you consider multiple attacks per turn (or multiple turns of attacks). Eight points of guaranteed damage across five turns or attacks is 40 points of damage. It adds up.

We are back in the Farmville-style world of spreadsheet games and MMO "dps" numbers, and never feeling like we have a Mjölnir and could smack some sense into the Hulk (or a truck) with our weapon. We still have a problem with the D&D and Pathfinder concept of magic weapons and the implementation of them feels more like a numbers game than it does something living up to our idea of epic fantasy.

The Rules Do Not Allow Epic Greatness

Throw Thor in there, and the gamer in me feels like it breaks down and GM-fiat is needed to say, "well, Thor's +5 hammer can bust right through that 10-foot thick castle wall!" And the player with their +4 spear can't even poke through a locked heavy wooden door. If this was a comic book, the player with that +4 spear could hold it in front of them and run straight through several doors leaving a trail of splinters and kindling in their wake.

No, not working. The rules do not allow for what we expect to happen, especially for epic weapons and the superheroes we want to be (and expect the rules to handle).

Low-Powered High Fantasy

Warriors in the D&D games have always felt less than epic to us, like they were the classes meant to play the spreadsheet part of the game with numbers and modifiers.

Or just...play a wizard in D&D. That is where you will get that superhero experience of larger-than-life powers. This has always been a problem for us, and spells feel like their movie counterparts where the weapons and armor of warriors do not.

One exception is Tunnels and Trolls, where the damage from warriors is so high you could say "you do 200 points of damage in this turn with your spear, and since I said each door had 20 hits, you can slice through 10 doors as you move this turn. Enjoy yourself and try not to destroy the furniture." It's one damage roll for the turn, use it any way you want. 

You could do that in D&D too, but the game goes all simulation-ist with object strength and AC values - so pure mayhem in D&D is discouraged under a wet blanket of simulation. If you are fighting a truck, I am going to need rules for trucks now. In T&T, I say the truck has 100 hits, and you flatten it in one blow. Even with a normal hammer because T&T discourages the MMO magic item economy and you fight with mostly normal weapons. So yes, you could be awesome enough in T&T to take a ball-peen hammer and flatten a truck to a pile of crushed debris in one blow.

Or two trucks.

Just don't damage the furniture.

Your 15 Minutes of Adventure Are Up

D&D 3E introduced us to this wonderful concept of the 15-minute adventuring day. It goes something like this:

"Hey guys, I used all my spells in that last encounter. Let's go back to town and rest."

Now, this existed before 3E to be fair, and this issue has really been seen more with D&D than other role playing games. Part of the problem is D&D itself, adventures are designed around a series of encounters with CRs that are supposed to balance play and use up resources at a predictable rate. This does not always work, and I feel CR misleads us in a number of ways:

• Randomness leads to greater or lesser resource usage
• The CR system is too simplistic to deal with the complexity of the game's classes and powers
• Players don't care about balanced fights and "burn down" every encounter

The first one is interesting, and yes, a series of bad rolls will double or use up your entire excursion's resources (spells, potions, powers) and you are stuck. Since the rest of the encounters in the dungeon were carefully balanced around you having some resources to deal with it, it's game over man, time to bug out. One encounter drops your party resources to zero, and if this is a "one time only" dungeon with an objective (like most should be), you have lost. That's it. Bad dice have let the bad guy get away with the princess, and that's the knocks of a story-based game.

Yes, the d20 with its wide variance is partially to blame here, it isn't the best die to use if you want a strong average, but with D&D it's what we got.

Another side note. D&D 4E tried to solve this problem with at-wills and encounter powers. the designers of D&D 4 were trying to solve a lot of problems, and this one they did a pretty good job at (tactical miniatures wise, not role playing wise). They introduced the concept of regenerating powers and healing surges, and that kept the party going into the next part of the story. For story-gaming, D&D 4 had a lot of nice improvements over D&D 1-3 and D&D 5. Mind you, the design of D&D 4 did not lend itself to roleplaying all that well, but as a tactical miniatures game where you played stories, it was interesting (counting the first 3 books or so before everything started going to the lower planes).

The second point is also interesting. In some ways I feel the CR system is overly simplistic and it does not take a lot of factors into account. One the other side, if it did the CR calculation system would be something as complex as calculus to figure out encounter balance. With Pathfinder, I have seen reports that modules designed against earlier versions of the game are now too easy with the power creep introduced in later books, and that encounters need to be toughened up to be a challenge again. Old CR does not equal the new CR, and the rating slips as time goes on.

Burn downs. This I have been waiting to talk about, because every player coming from an MMO knows about this one, and this is how most videogames train players nowadays. When you are in a MMO, in each encounter you 100% burn down all your powers and abilities in order to beat it. It does not matter if it is a hall fight or a boss fight, you keep pressing every button, keep hitting every power as its timer comes up, and maximize your damage output to 100% in every fight. In the old Everquest, this wasn't the case and you had to practice careful resource management through a zone. Past that, most modern MMOs make you burn down as fast as possible in order to get through a fight.

The reason? It's flashy! It's more exciting! It solves players from complaining the dungeon is too hard and filling up your customer service system with too many tickets.

So many videogame and MMO players are trained to burn down.

Now, many players get it when they begin playing pen-and-paper. They get the careful resource management game. The games fight this though, and try to make things easier on players by giving them infinite-use attack cantrips (D&D 5), or multi-shot built-in class attack powers (Pathfinder). D&D 4 had infinite-use at-will powers and auto-recharging encounter powers. Even 3E had a plethora of multi-use wands, scrolls, and other items that let you blast away with rechargable wands of magic missiles and fireball staffs. You see the burn-down starting to creep back in.

Player power has increased dramatically over the last 15 years of D&D to keep up with the MMO arms and expectation race.

Personally? I find burn downs boring and resource management more compelling. I like story-based play (a separate topic entirely), but I appreciate games that force you to make hard choices.

In old-school gaming like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord, giving a magic user infinite ranged attack cantrips would be unthinkable. Today, shooty and flashy are the new thing and the new norms. In the past, you didn't doll up with magic items and carry around enough rechargable magic items to blow through days of content. If your DM was stingy, you pulled the "go back to town" thing. If he wasn't, you loaded up for bear with enough magic to blow a hole in the side of White Plume Mountain.

In older editions of D&D and today's OGR games, the magic item economy is sparse, and you don't get into it as much. A wand of magic missiles is rare and special. A +1 sword is Excalibur. You survive on your wits and a player's ability to coax room descriptions out of the DM's head to avoid the trap of doom in the next room. Then again, the story in old-school games was a lot like today's 'sandbox" games. Do you survive? What do you do? Old-school games focused on the stories of the characters in that personal survival story, and not the DM's or module writer's story.

I blame Vampire: The Masquerade back in AD&D 2E days for this "module as story" stuff really. Vampire showed us a wonderful roleplaying game focused on personal stories, and AD&D had to follow suite and try to make dungeoning "story gaming" as well. Vampire did story gaming elegantly. AD&D had a lot more trouble making that leap because of the abstraction and resource management, and that theme of "story dungeoning" has stayed with us ever since, even across 3E's magic-card-if-i-cation of the rules.

So this pesky resource management game is getting in the way of completing tonight's story dungeon! Let's punt, take a mulligan, and head back to town to ignore this archaic D&D resource management system and continue on, shall we? If you are going to be in any way realistic about this dungeon master and reset the encounters, make us roll for wilderness encounters, or make us 'lose' the story for taking a break in the middle, then I guess you are a horrible dungeon master who hates well-told stories and famous module designers, right?

I am being sarcastic, but I have had those feelings come up at my table before so they are there.

There is an internal struggle here that I feel D&D has never gotten over. There is a simulation side to old-school D&D with the resource game, and if you have never played an old-school game, I recommend you do to see what I am talking about. It is a different game. Health does not auto-recharge. What you take in is it for possibly 100 rooms. The game is simple and deadly. Characters die frequently. You struggle. There is a mental game going on where you pry descriptions out of the DM, be clever, avoid fights, and survive.

3E and Pathfinder? Stuck in the middle of storytelling and resource management. Deck-building RPGs at heart.

4E and D&D 5E? Storytelling games at their heart and trying hard to shed old-school D&D's resource management game. Heavily MMO-influenced with recharging and infinite-use powers, with D&D 4 being the more MMO game, but D&D 5 shooting for the feel of 2E's story-dungeoning feel.

None of them are bad, and players love each for different reasons. This is not an argument one is better than another. You play what you love. But, you need to understand what each one brings, and where the conflicts are. If I ran D&D 5, I would go for more story than resource management, because that's what that game does best. I would adjust the story if players felt their party needed to take five, and advance the story in a logical way that reflects them having to take a breather. The show would go on. There wouldn't be a 15-minute adventuring day because the story reacts.

In old-school games? Yes, you can bet I would come down like a ton of bricks on a party that wasted its resources in wasteful burn-downs and had to retreat to town. Old school games are the Old Testament of resource management sims. Roll for wilderness encounters to and from the dungeon. Roll for wandering monsters all the way down to the point you left off. The dungeon's residents react and adapt to the last incursion, setting up traps, moving to rooms deeper (or to ones you thought you cleared), clearing out, or calling for reinforcements. You take a 15-minute day, and I will make you regret it for the next 15 days, but that is the old-school dungeon master's job.

The trouble comes when the game's designers try to please everybody, and tell you that the game is good for all types of play. It's cool marketing speak, but it isn't true. Some games do things better than others, and that's okay. Another problem arises when the game's designers put in systems geared to resource management when the game shines in story-based play. I can't blame them, the marketers said 'make it appeal to everybody' so sometimes you get systems in games better ignored than used. It happens, and game design isn't a perfect science.

Know what you like. Know what your players like. Most importantly, know what you expect from a game, and how a game shapes that experience.

You Just Save-or-Died My Story, Not Cool

One of the interesting things about the new D&D 5 edition is we are back to one-shotting players and taking characters out of the game. There are one-shot 'take you out of the game' spells, official podcasts with DM insta-kills, and the old-school feeling of deathtrap dungeons and random PC death is back big time. It is cool to see the old-school feeling back!

Right?

But, um, dude. What about my story?

What do you mean your story?

When I generated my character, there were these tables, and they were all like, hey, wow, you get a random story attached to your character when you spin him up. And I was like, cool, hey, that is pretty nifty, now I can be like those dudes from Lord of the Rings and all.

Then you made me make a save-or-die saving throw and insta-killed my guy.

Dude, not cool.

Hey, don't blame me, old-school is back. This isn't D&D 4, a game that goes out of its way to make sure nobody feels slighted or marginalized at the table, that everyone's contributions are important, and those "ruin the night for one player" moments were written out of the game. Those days are over. This is the return of the real, and we are back to the old way of doing this, so toughen up and get with us old-schoolers, right?

Dude, I liked my story. Why have a story on your guy if the game is telling you to run around and kill our player characters off like some psycho in a slasher flick?

Oh yeah, I forgot this isn't AD&D, or even a retro-clone like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord. In those games, some of the true old-school classics, your guy was just a couple 3d6 rolls and some hit points, and you didn't even get a story chart to roll on. Heck, you didn't even name your guy until he got to third level and was worth caring about.

Yeah, well. Dude, I grew up playing World of Warcraft, and I am pretty used to the idea that losing my guy warrants a call to customer service. He may be the same hero who saves the world along with 5.5 million other players, but that's my story, and I am entitled to it.

Well, we have to be fair here, would you be that angry if I, as DM, insta-killed your Pathfinder character?

Well, dude, yeah. I put a lot of time into that build!

As I recall, you copied that build from someone else's forum post.

Dude, not cool. Even though someone else came up with it, I punched it into Hero Lab. Plus the paper I used to print it out, and the toner. It's a lot of work.

So let me get this straight. You don't play the old-school games because player death is easy, the characters are too simple, and the story parts are more compelling than the mechanics?

If I am going to spend my Saturday playing a game, I want something out of it, dude. I want my character to be a part of something, to matter, and for my choices to mean something. Just 3d6 in six scores doesn't mean anything to me, I want to design my guy, and have those choices matter. I want there to be some story to play through, and for that story arc to be a part of character design.

What about the concept of 'you make your own story?' You know, where what you do in the face of impossible odds is the compelling narrative, and watching dozens fall before the one true hero rises is a part of the fun?

Dude, the first guy I spin up is the one true hero.

But D&D 5 has save-or-die!

The game also has built-in stories. Where is the fun in having my character get killed before his aunt finds out he is a thief? This is story-based game.

Story-based does not mean 'player protection' from bad decisions. Even story-based games are like that. You walk a tightrope here, if you make great decisions, you may get the satisfaction of advancing your personal story. Fair trade?

Not if it is save or die. Dude, even if I played this for the combat and tabletop side I would be pretty pissed if I failed a save-or-die saving throw. All that work, all those adventures, just game over. It's a pretty rotten thing taking a character off the board with one roll. If I fail, I want it to be because of my bad decisions, not a cheap "you lose, thank you for playing" 50-50 roll.

It's the cheap thrill of Russian roulette with my player character, not cool.

Where this Started

You know, sometime long ago these games used to be about the thrill of working through a simple rules system that was deadly and absolute, and working out a way to survive and profit despite the sheer impossibility of survival. Many characters did not make it, because they were just that, playing pieces in Monopoly where you laughed if one of them fell off a cliff and you chalked it up to "how the game works." They were easy to spin up because they were so disposable, and you weren't supposed to invest yourself in them all that much.

Nowadays, things have changed.

How so?

I agree that if you are playing a story based game, save-of-die sucks. I also think it sucks in a tactical game, because it robs you of your input, and it does feel like a Russian roulette mechanic for cheap tension. In a classic old-school game, I see its place though. Old school isn't about fair, and you stayed away from save-or-die monsters or situations, because you got XP directly from treasure, not the artificial challenge rating of monsters. Somewhere along the line someone introduced the concept of "if it is a good fight, players deserve XP" when that wasn't in the game.

The concept of XP for a good and balanced fight that you will most likely win comes from the admission that the game is mass-market entertainment. I feel it is a dumbing down of the concept, making the game more like a videogame, and putting in an artificial slot-machine constant-feedback reward system that keeps players coming back.

Save-or-die was in old-school games to discourage you from doing a straight-up fight with that medusa. It was better to sneak past her, find a way to deal with her other than combat. If you stole her 1,000 GP brooch, you got 1,000 XP. Any way you got it was fair game.

Nowadays, the medusa is engineered to be a fun encounter 'worth' the XP she is assigned. You get no XP for treasure, so you are forced to fight her for the XP. In a way, it is more bloodthirsty because you are putting a point value on a life (defeated however), rather than a goal or a treasure. This is a concept taken straight from videogames that reinforces the "kill for experience" sort of very basic and almost darkly sinister motivation for the game. Now, 'killing' means 'defeating in any way, knocking out, etc' in many games, but the points are 'owned' by the encounter.

There are also 'story XP' which is a system that attempts to cover story-players as well.

I do feel D&D's reward system has been messed up for a while, ever since AD&D 2nd Edition where they started the story award XP system formally, and also reset monster XP along those levels.

If the game wants to be story based, then remove XP for killing things.

If the game wants to be hack-and-slash, then remove story XP.

Reward Systems

Personally? I like story-based XP systems. I think XP for killing is a bit cold and bloodthirsty, like a genocidal bounty system. I liked the XP for GP thing of old-school play though, in a fun sort of way because it encourages creative play. The goal is to out-think the monsters and grab the loot. You are like this group of Ocean's 11 thieves looting and sneaking your way through dungeons, each person with a special ability (healing, fighting, sneaking, magic) but with only one goal - grabbing the loot the easiest way possible.

If the king wants to pay your party a "story award" of 10,000 GP for rescuing the princess, then pocketing 10,000 XP is also your motivation. The XP are nice, but really everybody, we are here for one reason and one reason only, shiny gold coins.

In this context and the original game's motivation of "XP for treasure" a save-or-die mechanic makes sense. You are a playing piece out to accumulate as many GP as possible. Yes, some monsters and traps are "save or die," but the balance is to not fight them or be stupid enough to step into them. You certainly don't get XP for the artificial reward of "beating" them, so trick, avoid, and circumvent these monsters as best you know how and the tools given to you will allow.

So, save-or-die is in there, but it is something to avoid?

Exactly. It is a different design and motivation for the entire game. Balance issues clear up because there is not an artificial reward tacked onto a creature, so there is no need for a CR system to rate difficulty. An owlbear is an owlbear. Fight it if you think you can, or avoid it if the dungeon designer was smart enough to put another way around. Save-or-die was a disincentive, not a game design mechanic someone needs to balance.

The definition of "railroading" in pen-and-paper games changed too. In the old days, railroading was that a module designer forced you to solve a problem one way, or forced you into a fight you could not avoid. When RPGs went story-based, railroading was forcing you to play the story the module designer's way. In the old definition, railroading was more about giving the players choices in how they wanted to approach a situation. It was about the freedom to approach a problem and allowing for that.

It is partly D&D's problem because of its heritage. D&D by its nature is a "big tent" game that takes inspiration from many fantasy sources. This means the reasons people play the game are just as varied, and the game has to support many types of reward systems. It needs videogame XP for hack-and-slashers. It needs story XP for roleplayers. It got rid of XP for GP, which I think is a mistake.

Understanding Fairness

But yes, understanding reward and motivation are key to understanding why save-or-die mechanics work in some games and not others. It is ultimately about that feeling of unfairness, but to decide if something is unfair, you need to understand both the motivation for play and how the reward system works. Some games have simple motivations, so judging what's fair is easy. Other games are more complicated, and you layer in characters that take hours to design, or story systems on top of bounty systems, and things get more complex.

Fairness is ultimately judging if a reward is worth the risks, and not feeling cheated should things not work out. In a way, fairness measures how you feel about defeats and successes, and the satisfaction of the proportionality of a reward given a risk.

Bounded Accuracy vs. Simulation

For over 40 years D&D has had an issue with the to-hit system. At first, they had giant AC versus level tables for each class; then they switched to a system where different classes had different to-hit bonuses at maximum level, and they metered out the to-hit increases every level. It meant if you weren't a pure fighter, forget hitting anything at maximum level because all the monsters at max level were balanced for a fighter's attack bonus.

D&D 3 and Pathfinder follow the sort of design theme of great classes (fighters) get +20 at max level, sucky classes (rogues, clerics) get +15 at max level, and really sucky classes (mages) get a +10 at max level. Mind you, if you are fighting an AC 30 monster, great classes will hit at 50% of the time, sucky 25%, and really sucky will be like "5%, why even try?" Of course, mages will be flinging spells, so that 5% never really matters. Feats and proficiency make the difference, and one had to take into account damage output, but the base system is still set in an assumption of some classes are better than others when hitting a target. There is also a multiple attacks thing here with high attack bonuses, so damage output is linked in.

D&D 4 sets everything on a sliding scale, using 1/2 your level plus your ability score DRM to give you your attack bonus. You must have a high ability score, maintain it, and have the recommended magic items for your level to "keep up with the Joneses," aka the monsters. If a monster was 4 or more levels above you, forget it. If a monster was 4 levels below you, you could care less about them. It was a very MMO feeling game that was balanced "on the levels" and had a flat balance.

D&D 5 preserves the flat MMO-style balance, and puts everyone on the same to-hit chart, but makes the maximum bonus a +6 for everybody. Everything else, monsters, magic items, and combat, has been realigned to fit within this new model. This is called "bounded accuracy" and it is the central design premise behind the new D&D, to get those numbers back in control and make everyone feel they can contribute. There are plenty of problems with this, such as the lowest-level monsters being able to hit high-level heroes (in the context of this system), and high-level heroes still having a high miss rate that still feel unsatisfying for many. The system also breaks with mass attacks and does not scale well with larger groups or attacks that add conditions on hit (poison).

Then again, it feels like they have been wrestling with making the abstract AC and level-based to-hit system for 40 years and they still haven't got it right.

Abstract Accuracy

It is difficult to criticize the D&D to-hit system because it is intentionally abstract. You can get into a long argument with other players and fans of differing editions, and all you will be doing is arguing over is if mauve or thistle is more "purple." Because the system is so abstract, the designers need to carefully "code" AC and attack bonuses in with each edition to make the game work. In computer programming speak, D&D's combat system is spaghetti code and a mess of special cases, and it needs to be hand-tuned any time they move to a new edition or they make a new expansion or book for the game. The AC and to-hit numbers have to be directly balanced against the monsters from level 1 to 20, or everything breaks down.

In D&D 4, it did not feel like the later levels were as well-playtested, and things felt like they broke down the higher level you went. There were so many erratas and rules changes over the life of that game it spun your head, along with a second version of the monster manual coming out in Essentials that changed the math again. Every monster manual changed the math, and it hurt the experience for us.

Simulation Games

Contrast this with a more simulation based game with a less abstract system. If my fighter has a 60% chance to hit with a sword, it doesn't matter if I am swinging it at a level 1 goblin or a level 30 dragon, I am still making that piece of metal strike that other shape no matter what that other shape may be, 60% of the time. The effects of what happens will vary greatly upon what I hit and the personal power I have, If I am as strong as a hill giant I will expect to splatter the goblin and hurt the dragon. If I am as strong as a human, I expect the goblin to take a wound, and the dragon to laugh and say he didn't even feel it.

Most of the time. Exceptions and great rolls always exist.

You can give a rogue and a fighter the same to-hit, and work out the differences with powers, techniques, and ability scores. You can do away with abstract levels and subjective armor class values entirely. You can rate armor on protection, and let the dice fall where they may because you created a simulation system where things in your world work a certain way.

Your characters exist within themselves, not in the context of a carefully balanced level system.

Level Systems

Now, level systems are great because they let you change the math and put out a new edition. The only exception was AD&D 2nd Edition, where they cleaned up the original AD&D rules and improved the presentation greatly. They really didn't change the math, but they streamlined it and created the "I don't understand why nobody gets this" THAC0 system, but I guess many had a problem with it. THAC0 (to hit armor class zero) was easy enough to understand, but they should have made AC increasing and flipped those around, and just said to-hit is your base plus target AC, like they did in 3rd Edition.

Negative AC in AD&D sucked, and it was likely nobody ever thought ACs lower than zero were ever needed. Explaining negative AC felt like explaining THAC0 to the uninitiated.

But part of the problem with an abstract system is linking level to to-hit, especially when it starts blowing out your dice range. Having a +20 to hit at 20th level, plus ability DRMs, plus magic item bonuses, plus feat modifiers, plus situational modifiers can get you to a final to-hit bonus of +30 or more easily. On a 1-20 scale, a +30 makes the entire number range of your randomizer meaningless. You are rolling between 31 and 50, and trying to hit an AC of 42.

The mind boggles, the numbers are so high, and the DC and AC numbers are again on that meaningless, super-high if +10 is better than give me another +20 MMO number scale that never ends.

Bounded Accuracy is the New Coke

I am not convinced D&D 5's bounded accuracy does much to solve the problem of D&D's abstract system other than change the numbers again. There were some D&D and Pathfinder mods (E6 most notably) which put a level cap of 6 on the game, and this appears to be where the bounded accuracy idea originated from. E6 is a laudable game modification for D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder, it assumes that 6th level characters are the most powerful in the game world and lets the monsters past that be the world's "boss creatures" and teamwork is needed for beating them.

You throw out the entire upper three-quarters of the game to do so, but it does get that sense of scale and challenge back that D&D loses when a thief levels past the power of an adult red dragon. Where D&D 5 and E6 differ is that in E6 there is a huge world out there more powerful than any single hero could ever be. In D&D 5, every hero can be a level 20 monster some day, yet they still need level 30 monsters out there that are even more powerful than that.

But limiting everyone to the same to-hit chart and capping it at +6 (plus mods)? Really, none of my players really like advancing that slow, and it feels like a grind. Your hit-points go up normally, so you have these hundreds of hit point monster characters walking around with a +3 or a +4 to-hit, and your sense of heroic scale is all skewered. I would prefer the level cap to six to a slow grind to twenty and a +6 when I get there.

Yes, bounded accuracy makes the numbers meaningful again, no question.

But I feel you give up too much. High level characters lose their sense of "being good" and the harsh d20 and its variability stomp all over a modifier range that starts at a +5% to-hit bonus and ends up at a +30% to-hit bonus for epic characters. Even with ability score mods and magic items it doesn't go much higher, and high level characters feel like they are just talented normals. It feels like you are just fooling with the numbers again instead of fixing the problem.

Wonderland

It all feels like D&D's power curve has been messed up since the original box set that level capped you at three, yet the monster lists had 9 or so hit die dragons. Sooner or later, you could level past those dragons, and we entered a strange fantasy land where we needed bigger and bigger challenges to overcome. D&D has always had this "videogame in pen and paper" feeling to me, where of course characters are entitled to incredible amounts of hit points and power, and the sense of scale between normal people and high level characters reaches absurd levels.

D&D 5, despite bounded accuracy, I feel does not address this problem, as the higher levels in that game still entitle characters to massive amounts of hit points and damage output that boggles the mind compared to a first level character. The difference between high-level and low level has not changed, only the dicing model has gotten flatter and everyone can hit each other now.

It still feels like a videogame to me. I feel that a dragon like Smaug out of the Hobbit is beyond the power of any single hero in that world, and any hero could ever be. In D&D and Pathfinder, this isn't the case. I get this World of Warcraft feeling where characters are driven primarily by advancement than story, and personal power is the name of the game. It isn't down, it doesn't feel realistic, and the abstract system keeps you from ever understanding or balancing it because it is so carefully tuned and system-wide teeter-tottering on the sum balance of its parts.

If you disagree with two-handed weapon damage and change it, you break the rest of the game.

Abstractionification

It isn't D&D or Pathfinder that is at fault, I feel, it is the abstraction and the magnitude. Once you abstract one piece, you have to abstract everything, and then the balancing act begins. Level based to-hits and ACs that could mean everything from a high dodge to tank armor along with out-of-control hit points and damage make the entire system feel more like an ever-higher level Facebook game requiring more time and clicks than something that models reality.

If there was a D&D game out there that got it right in terms of comparative power and the weak against the impossible, I would be all over it.

I want games that make me fear the dragon, not know that someday I will out level it. I want games that give me a basis in reality, rather than hand wave it away and apply an arbitrary number to it. This is likely a personal preference thing with me and my players, and I try my best at explaining it, so don't feel bad or get angry if you enjoy these games. These are systems that within their own spheres, work, and they are tuned to work well.

But they don't feel real, they feel like videogames.

But a character with 200 hit points when a normal person has 5? I lose it. I can't relate. That number is meaningless in reality, and really only has a place in electronic gaming to me. Same thing with wildly high to-hits, damage outputs, or world-ending spells. It is an unrelatable world-crushing Superman to the common-man Batman.

It is having it all versus being a hero without.

D&D 5: Ranger Revamp

It's time to fire 150,000 play-testers, or at least just the group that played rangers (so roughly about 12,500 playtesters by my math). So D&D 5's ranger class is getting a Pathfinder Unchained rogue style class revamp in the upcoming Unearthed Arcana book, according to this article over on the main D&D site. Part of me sits here and wonders how something this basic was missed, I mean, this playtest group was three times as large as Pathfinder's, right? Does nobody play rangers? How did this happen?

I hear the voice of one of my old bosses echoing through my head. If we let something like this slip and ship there would be hell to pay.

But really, when you are in the realm of quality testing, the larger you get the worse your feedback gets. You cannot throw three times the people at a problem and think you are getting a three times better test; it is actually quite the opposite, as smaller groups tend to produce better-thought out designs. There is a point in quality assurance where you have so many voices nothing gets heard, and you spend most of your time sorting through feedback instead of designing and improving. Too many cooks is a real problem in quality assurance and playtesting.

But a D&D 5 ranger revamp? Part of me feels, "and so it begins." Because you know once the UA ranger revamp is done, it will be another class that is seen as the 'problem.' This will continue until my shelf is filled with more D&D 5 books (or web supplement fixes) than Pathfinder, with book after book introducing 'fixes' and then creating more problems with power creep or relative power changes. Until, that is, calls for a simplified and streamlined D&D 6 start being heard.

What about fighters? What about rogues? There are complaints about those as well. We need a new Martial Guide to fix those!

MMOs as Tabletop Games

Stop it. No. Bad game designers. I hate the MMO-ification of pen and paper games, because frankly, MMOs do this better. I log in, all the changes (hate them or not) are auto-downloaded in a patch, and the world goes on. My shelf isn't littered with the mistakes of a version 1.0 game. I bought into Shadowrun 4.0 heavily, and I am hesitant about buying 5.0 because it's fixed now. Get it right the first time, especially if you print a book.

I can sympathize with the game designers, because you can never get things right on the first version. It makes me think that all games should be a PDF exclusive for the first year or two, and then print a book later after all the bugs have been worked out. This may be the answer I would like the best. I could support a model like that, because it feels honest to how game development works nowadays.

Admittedly, Pathfinder has a lot of books, but the base classes went through a couple versions of D&D 3 before they ended up how they are today. Where Pathfinder stumbles is typically in the new classes, those are version 1.0 designs that need fixes, but the basic book's set (except for the rogue, but I know players who like the non-Unchained rogue better) were tested across 15 years of design and feedback and are pretty solid. If I am going to play a game where the D&D power curve has been balanced and perfected, I will play the foil-covered D&D 3.5 books or the basic book of Pathfinder.

Paid Beta Tests

I don't need or want to buy in to another beta test, because my old games work and I own them. There is a point where I stop admiring 'new and shiny' and put more value in 'what works.' You see this 'flight to quality' in cars, computers, tablets, and many other things. Some big new thing will drop on the market. It is cool and all the rage. But, it has problems. They promise in version two they will work those out! If you are an Apple fan you know what I am talking about. So you either live with something that has issues, or go back to a slightly older model that 'just works' the way it was designed. Or you are an 'early adopter' and suffer through a paid beta.

We Can Do Better

But this whole MMO-style class re-balancing is a part of where I think the entire pen-and-paper industry has just went so wrong. We are better than MMOs. We do everything they don't and can't do. We don't need to sit here and worry about class roles, power curves, class balancing, and DPS. It feels asinine, like we could do better than this, and the entire 'story based' and 'shared roleplaying' experience part of our hobby is enslaved to the power gamers and the number crunchers.

I just get this feeling, as game designers we can do better than this. If your game design model is MMO, then don't ship printed books. Make your game subscription based, design characters electronically, and store character sheets in the cloud. Auto-update and fix my designs if you patch. D&D 4 went this way, but they made the mistake of printing books. It is kind of ironic that the printed books will outlive the electronic errata and character designer, but that is how they designed that game. If you are going to follow the MMO model, then you can do better than shipping books that are full of errors and you will errata out of existence later.

Let Storytelling Rule?

Or better yet, don't chase the MMO model at all. Let pen-and-paper games be pen-and-paper games, and stop trying to live up to the fantasy that pen-and-paper roleplaying is just an MMO played on the tabletop. Design games where story comes first, and de-emphasize the entire 'character build' culture. Put the story first, and take the power curve out of the game. Basic Fantasy provides a fantasy gaming experience without a steep power curve, mind you, the curve still exists, but it isn't as dramatic where a dragon has hundreds or thousands of hit points.

It feels like a viscous circle where D&D started the roleplaying ball rolling, videogames copied D&D, and now D&D is copying videogames. It feels like an invisible power curve controls everything behind the scenes and it is constantly being tweaked and refined, with our books being left by the wayside.

It is frustrating. Part of me wishes they would have fixed D&D 4. Another part of me just wishes they would have settled on a cleaned-up but unchanged AD&D 2nd Edition and said "this is the game we love." Why we need to keep reinventing the wheel in terms of fantasy gaming is beyond me.

Escalating Hit Points and Damage

D&D 5 made an effort to reduce the range of to-hit modifiers in the game, from +20 at maximum level down to a +6. Now, this can be affected by other modifiers such as ability scores and magic items, but the range is down from D&D 3 and Pathfinder era modifiers that are in the +30 range down to a more reasonable and d20 range friendly +10-ish level, or about half-ish.

"Bounded accuracy" is why, the design team wanted to get the modifiers to dice rolls under control and back within a meaningful amount. Some players feel the difference between low and high level characters is too tight and it creates a feeling that to-hit progression has been taken out of the game, with level only really contributing a 4 point difference between level 1 and level 20.

It does eliminate a key difference between low and high-level characters. Players like to feel empowered, and they like the feeling their epic ranger can deal death left and right at will, hitting impossible shots. But, the whiff factor feels pretty static throughout the game. Yes, this does create the 'will I hit?' tension, but some feel that expertise and skill of higher-level characters has been reduced drastically.

This is a math discussion, so I forgive you if your eyes glaze over. But it does setup discussion for today's subject, escalating hit points and damage.

Damage Output at Level X

Now, hit points and damage output? Unchanged in the scheme of things, and D&D remains a game about the high-level haves and the low-level have-nots. Yes, a low-level character can hit and damage a high-level character, but it doesn't matter because of hit-points. The next turn, the high-level character can sneeze and obliterate the low-level character in one blow, so being able to hit matters less. Only in the game-breaking tactic of massed attacks do low-level character have a chance, and this applies to everyone in the game.

While the designers have addressed the die-roll ranges, not much was done about the ever-escalating power curve of hit points and damage output. In a sense, the only difference between high and low level characters is damage output, and that has been the design ever since D&D 3 came out. In AD&D 2nd Edition, higher level characters could do more damage, but not to the videogame-like extent of D&D 3 characters and that design.

In basic D&D, if a level 20 fighter "hit" you with a longsword, it was still one attack at 1d8 damage plus ability score modifiers. He could hit auto-you all day with one attack a turn, but that damage per turn was still on a flat curve. With D&D 3, multi-attacks and a whole host of feat-based damage modifiers were introduced, which slowed up play with fistfuls of d20s being rolled for melee attacks, and damage output soared and continued to rise with almost every edition released.

But still, overall with most all editions of D&D and also Pathfinder, escalating hit points and damage output tends to turn the game into a combat simulator heavily focused on numbers. There may be some winks and nods towards non-combat skills and problem-solving, but the game lives and breaths on its combat system, and most modules focus on 'good fights' and 'balanced encounters' with a combat focus. It feels at times the D&D based games want to be videogames and MMOs with that heavy focus on combat and escalating numbers.

Who cares about problem solving when your character has 200 hit points and that dagger does a d4 damage? Do you know my damage-per-turn rating? It's awesome.

Yes, a great referee can mitigate this with varied challenges, but when we played the D&D games, we always had one player at the table who focused on character builds and combat, and this infected many other players with the optimization bug and focusing on combat rather than roleplaying and problem solving. The game is focused along these lines so it feels like you are unfairly punishing the min-maxers by putting skill and roleplaying challenges in front of them.

The Game Becomes Combat?

If you compare D&D with a flatter power curve system, such as Savage Worlds, Legend, or even GURPS you notice a couple things. Non-combat skills in those games feel equally important as combat skills. D&D has always had this feeling of a Superman syndrome at higher levels, especially the later versions past 2nd Edition AD&D. Who cares about problem solving when you have this much raw combat power?

Yes, you can make players 'lose' a mission and feel bad they didn't rescue the princess, but in a way, it really doesn't affect them.

There is a danger in making every player Superman. The game becomes about bashing bigger and bigger things, and the little things don't matter anymore. You lose a sense of scale. Combat becomes the only important challenge. A good referee can make the game be about other things, but still, the 500 hit die gorilla in the room is still combat. It's so big, the players are so powerful, and the system is tuned around making characters combat gods that the primary way of viewing a class is by its combat potential.

The first version of rogues in Pathfinder were 'skill monkeys' and 'couldn't contribute meaningfully to combat?' We got balanced and high-damage output rogues in Unchained?

Two questions:

1. Why do non-combat skills suck?
2. Why are we playing a tabletop MMO?

I have this feeling it is not a problem with the adventures, but the entire endless escalating hit point and damage output system of games like D&D past the basic set, and also Pathfinder.

Basic Fantasy vs. Modern Games

I use Basic Fantasy here because it is the most 3.5-like old-school game we have, and it's free so you can check it out for comparison. In my version of Basic Fantasy, an ancient red dragon with 13 hit dice has about an average of 59 hit points. In Pathfinder, it has 362 hit points. In D&D 5, it has 546 hit points. In D&D 4, it has 1,390 hit points.

What the hell, game designers?

Rolling ten to twenty times the dice for damage isn't fun, it's pointless. In Basic Fantasy, my 1d8+2 successful longsword hit to that 60 hit-point beast means something. In all the other modern fantasy games, it means very little or nothing.

The new games make up for it by putting a videogame-like power curve in place. Multi-attacks. Huge fixed bonuses. Powers that scale with level. D&D 5 tries to keep the to-hit static while scaling damage up. D&D 4 puts a 50% chance in place relative to level and scales damage. Pathfinder goes the multi-attack and fixed bonus route. It all scales with level.

Basic Fantasy is based off the old way of doing things. Your to-hit gets better as you level. You can do your damage easier. Your "damage output" increases because you are hitting more often. That's it.

Modern games put in an artificial power curve that scales both damage outputs and monster hit points based as you level. When you take that out and go back to the simple way of doing things, nothing much changes. That dragon is still dangerous. You are doing less damage, but it is meaningful damage.

It feels like the current design de-jour mantra is to go back to the original rules and make things feel like the older games. Well, there are games out there that are exactly like the way things were, and they are still different. The videogame-inspired power curve is still in place in all the modern designs.

Power Curves vs. Problem Solving

I feel the bigger issue is when the power curve becomes the game. Roleplaying problems, social challenges, and non-combat skill checks typically aren't included on the power curve. When you do put these on the curve, the result become nonsensical, like the DC 50 locked door.

I tried to run Pathfinder this way with DarkgarX. I promised him "non-combat skills will matter in this campaign" but still, he had that feeling that some module or situation was going to screw him over because he didn't make the best choices to satisfy the power curve.

With Basic Fantasy, you level how you level, your to-hit goes up, and you don't have to satisfy the demands of the artificial power curve based on your character design decisions. Your character levels up. You get a new hit die, maybe some spells, and you get a little better. That ancient red dragon still has 59 hit points, so even a 1d6+1 damage magic missile matters. It is closer to a flat system than any of the games which came afterwards.

There is still a power curve in Basic Fantasy, yes, but the original dice, in both the d20 for to-hits and polyhedral dice for damage, still matter. It is funny how a game with such a simple damage and to-hit model maintains the heroic feeling without all those extra added power curve rules. There was a simplicity and genius in the Basic D&D rules that was lost somewhere.

More importantly in Basic Fantasy, the focus is taken off combat and power escalation and put back onto problem solving. Combat still matters, but other things do too. Room descriptions. Puzzles. Figuring out how to take that chest of 500 gold pieces without a fight. Talking your way out of an encounter. Avoiding fights. Disarming traps. Stuff back at town.

Combat is not the best answer in old-school games. It is in many times, a last resort.

Sounds like real life, huh?

Find the Games You Like

It feels like the power curves designed into today's games are taken from videogames and slot machines where constant feedback, player empowerment, and 'combat as the answer' are the design goals.

Sometimes, yes, I want to play a game like that on the tabletop, and that's fine. I would rather play a videogame that does all the work for me though, such as Diablo 3, so there is that too. But if you don't realize the design decisions behind games, you play them because you feel you should, and not because they fit your preferred way of playing. This entire argument is really about education, and becoming more aware of how games are designed, and using that criteria to find games that better fit how you like to play.

If you like the power curve, great, but understanding a game and how its curve works will better let you select one you like. If you don't like the power curve, you need to know how to look for them and judge for yourself how the game works and if that fits your expectations.

If you never knew about the power curve and the design decisions behind games, that is a problem. Game designers aren't perfect, and they make silly mistakes. They also follow trends and design decisions sometimes without questioning them that lead the entire industry down a path it never realized it was following, such as chasing the power curve design model.

Realizing this and understanding game design makes you a better-informed consumer.

Pen-and-Paper Videogaming

Somehow, this all started when we were talking about XP charts.

When you have a unified XP chart, you are saying, "all class' power levels are roughly equivalent!" A level 5 thief should be as powerful as a level 5 fighter or level 5 mage.

Back in the original D&D, the designers knew about the power imbalance of mages and fighters (2,500 and 2,000 xp base), and put them above clerics and thieves (1,500 and 1,200 xp base). The charts were never a linear scale, just because a mage needed 2,500 xp for level two did not mean they advanced twice as slow as a thief all the way up, the difference between thieves and mages was never really more than a level or so of lag behind for the mage (a 14th level thief and a 12th level mage had around the same total xp).

Still, there was a difference.

In 3rd edition, we got the unified XP chart for all classes (and the CR system), and every class advanced at the same rate. Not surprisingly, those pesky power level differences came up, and this triggered an endless balance and rebalance cycle for all editions of the game since. You even see this in Pathfinder Unchained, where they redo three of the classes to make them compare better with the entire set of classes in the game.

"Mages are still the most powerful class in the game!"
"Rogues are weak."
"Why class X why you get all that plus a better to-hit with class Y?"

You hear a lot of this because naturally, a player expects a level five class X should be an equal and balanced choice with a level five class Y. You end up having to do the power and math shuffle on every class, again and again, like D&D 4th Edition's endless and painful errata and changes to classes and items.

If there was a problem with relative power level balance in the old "per class" XP chart system the issue could be easily addressed by just adjusting the charts. Mages still too powerful? Push them out by a thousand points here or there. So a level 9 thief is equivalent in raw power level to a what, a level 6 mage? Okay, that's where the charts should go.

We don't need to balance the class, we just adjust the charts.

The CR System Solution

Power levels were 'evened out' because of the CR system, really, and also to simplify things to avoid having a lot of charts. But note that in old school D&D, you did not all need to be the same level to adventure together, and conceivably, that level 6 mage in a party full of level 9 characters could and will contribute. This "the party needs to be within one level of each other, two max" sort of thing feels like it comes from MMOs and computer games, where it is important to balance things with math to make sure "everyone has a good time."

In the original D&D game, how did you determine CR? Here's how you did it:

"Last time our party of level one characters fought an ogre we got out butts kicked. Let's not do that."

You learned the game. There weren't thousands of creatures so you could weigh difficulty for them all relative to classes and powers. You failed, failed some more, died a lot, and then discovered what worked. You got lucky, and knew how far you could push your luck given what level you were and who was in the party. You had to think.

Try-fail-adjust-learn-succeed? That sounds like what you do in any game when you learn it.

The problem I have with CR encounter balancing is it assumes the dungeon master is a computer that balances content to entertain the players. The DM is there to "entertain" people like a DVD player, put in the disc, do the math, balance the game, and run the script. Press play.

Saying, "nobody likes getting killed," in D&D is like saying "nobody likes losing in Monopoly," and coming up with rules so one loses. Or even behind on money or properties every turn because every player needs to feel relative balance with each other. Yes, Monopoly is a competitive game, and D&D is cooperative, but if you take the learning curve out you take out the part of the game where becoming an experienced player is knowing what a monster does what and how you can fight them at what power level.

Pen-and-Paper as Videogames

Somehow I feel this is part of the progression of D&D towards an entirely story-based game instead of a board game. CR does what? Balances encounters so you can get through them all as a party so you can complete a story at the end of the night. Without CR, you run around the ogre's room in the center of the dungeon defeating rats and spiders while looting what you can, and maybe you never fight the ogre - and you decided if you 'won' based on survival. If there was a goal, it had nothing to do with 'story award xp bonuses' or a series of balanced encounters leading up towards it. If you got the chalice, you got it, and you earned the king's trust - xp and balancing had nothing to do with it.

Then again, the king's trust is a very nice thing to have, and you don't need to put an xp reward on that either.

Healing surges, regenerating resources, encounter powers, and anything that resets the party's power is another step towards a story based game (and also an admission of the inability to balance a resource depletion game, like the classic D&D model of play). You have to "reset" the party for the next "encounter" because you can't balance things in the overall scheme, when really, what resources the player have and want to spend should be up to them. It feels fake, like an MMO where health and mana regenerate before you get to the next room, and the entire game is designed to be low-risk entertainment rather than a challenge of how to spend limited resources dwindling all the time.

Don't get me started on this "go back to town" sort of "one encounter per day" cliche either, That comes from videogames and it assumes the world never changes between visits to the dungeon. The pen-and-paper game as videogame mentality breeds this unrealistic way of thinking.

Less is More is Fun

Sometimes we like games to be smaller in focus with a limited set of content, such as Pathfinder Basic Set, where we can get the feeling of how monster X relates to class Y and power Z. Part of why we love Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy are because these rules are complete, done, and what's in the game is what is it. You can learn them. You know a level X thief is about as powerful as a level Y mage. You know how to defeat an owlbear, and how much power and resources that will take.

When you have thousands never-ending of monsters, feats, spells, classes, and powers, you never get a feeling of system mastery. You are always being hit with a new something, reacting, and never knowing how your power relates to the others before it is replaced and you move onto the next one. In Basic D&D, the fireball is what it is, and it is a unique AoE spell that fits a unique role. We don't have or need seventy variations of the spell. It is a unique puzzle piece to be pulled out when you need a...fireball.

And it becomes a unique resource we can spend, that does not recharge between fights.

That "how many resources it will take" is key. This is what the original D&D was about in the macro for the entire play session, not the micro between encounters. You should be able to run out of resources and 'fail' to achieve your goal, due to luck, normal use, or carelessness. You should decide if you will come back another day, if that is possible, and the next time the dungeon should change (tougher, better defenses, less loot, the chalice is lost, or they clear out) when the party gets back.

Know Your Game

There is a distinct game design here when you realize what is going on, and how every piece works together. Imposing systems like CR and auto-regen resources on what was a limited-resource game throws everything out of whack, and D&D becomes a totally different game. We are seeing a shift from resource management to story based gaming, while still thinking we are managing resources.

If you want a videogame style RPG, that is cool. Know what these look like. If you want a resource-based RPG, know what those look like. If you want to make a pen-and-paper game play more like a videogame, it is helpful to know what you need to do to get that result. If your love is resource-based play, know what rules enhance that experience and play that way.

We live in a time where every publisher tries to make every game appeal to everybody, and it all blurs together. The influence of MMOs and computer games in pen-and-paper gaming is strong, you see a lot of these videogame-inspired concepts in today's games, and they often conflict with how the original game was designed.

Old-School Gaming is our Minecraft

"Take a look at this," the computer sales clerk says, "Dual SLI cards, the latest Intel 8-core, 64 GB of RAM, and..."

"But does it play Minecraft?"

Minecraft is a cultural phenomenon, and it is also one of the dominant forces in gaming today. It "gets it" by being so simple. It isn't complicated, it doesn't need RPG stats, and it doesn't need the latest game engine - it just is what it is, simple and infinitely expandable. It is also fun.

I am reminded of old-school gaming in this regard. Go into the dungeon, steal the loot, get XP, and avoid monsters. Combat isn't supposed to be exciting or well-balanced, this is a dangerous world and you have limited resources, so cheating the system is a part of the game. Fighting sucks, and it is an overall loss if you have to go in with spells flying and spells slinging.

I think that is a huge difference between true old-school gaming and the old-school clones (and I feel D&D 5 is an old-school clone as well) - there is this notion of a balanced, fun combat experience. This started with the magic-card-if-ication of D&D with 3E, where yes, tactical combat is a big draw of the game, and of course "modern" game designs have to make every aspect of the game fun and enjoyable. With 4E, we went back to the tabletop, and everything was 'balanced and fun tactical combat'. With 5E, we still keep the 3E balancing, but 2E's scripted story-gaming comes back with players having parts written in for them during character generation, and builds and combat are designed to be satisfying.

All choices are good, right?

Not really. Combat isn't supposed to be enjoyable or balanced in true old-school gaming. The rules aren't designed to protect you from bad choices, lousy rolls, or stupidity. You are a lucky hit away from a kobold killing your cleric, a poison dart killing your thief, a fireball killing your fighter, or an accidental step into a pit full of green slime away from melting your expendable magic user. Avoiding combat is what makes the game fun, tricking monsters, sneaking through the dungeon and disarming the traps, and putting the royal golden corkscrew to the dungeon master's well-thought out design.

Old school gaming is closer to a puzzle game or a text-adventure game than it is Diablo 3. You listen, you think, and you act carefully. You avoid combat if you can. You beat the dungeon master's diabolical designs. You sneak out with the golden chalice and the princess, and laugh as the dragon wonders "what just happened?"

With Minecraft, yes, combat is enjoyable, but it is also something that doesn't net profit (other than xp and an occasional item). Some combats are less enjoyable, and should be avoided (creepers). The zombies will show up, and you need to defend your fort. The game is not all about "enjoyable combats" though, since building and exploring are the game's main focus. There is a theme in Minecraft of "make your own fun" and I feel this is closer to an old-school game's philosophy than the more modern balanced/fun videogame-inspired designs.

In an old-school game, you were given a bunch of pieces and told to "make your own fun". With newer games (starting at 2E), you were given "stories" to "play through" and (with 3E) "balanced combat systems" to enjoy "building characters" with (4E and 5E). In an old school game, a 9 hit die green dragon could come stomping into town, and players were left to figure out how to deal with it through wits or clever roleplaying. Fighting it? Out of the question.

In newer games, we get the concept of "CR" or challenge rating tool to build encounters with, and a dungeon master who pulled the green dragon plot on a group would be frowned upon for not "balancing the encounter". It is really an alien concept pulled from self-balancing videogames, and one I feel that has no place in old-school gaming. If a party of level one characters wanted to go out and lure an owlbear into a pit and steal the beast's loot while it tried to climb out - so be it. That owlbear could probably clock them all in two rounds, but the risk and danger is what made the game fun.

The dungeon master didn't 'balance' things, the dungeon master created the world, and the players judged risks and were free to explore and adventure wherever they chose, and against whatever level of challenge they thought they could get away with. Sound familiar? Yes, that's Minecraft. A dangerous world where you could do anything you want, and there are no 'stories' or 'balanced fights' - you make your path through the world, you cheat death, and you deal with the challenges by working with what you find.

You are free to make your own adventures, and you are free to take as big of a risk as you can find out there in the world. The more you explore, loot, and exploit - the better off you are. And if you can do it all while avoiding unnecessary fights? Genius. In a way, it is philosophically the same game.

d100 vs. d20

In the older roll-under d100 systems, there was this one-to-one relationship between an ability score and the target number. The target number WAS your ability score, and if you raised your score, life got better.

Things flipped and became more dice-centric with d20 based games. Rolling high became the new thing, with the only exception being the older game Aftermath, a d20 roll-under system that worked a lot like the percentile systems. With the new d20 paradigm, rolling a natural 20 became the cool thing to do, and bang, that was it, you've made it in life.

Except when D&D 3 came along, and you had to confirm that crit.

Spoilsports.

It's funny the new versions of Car Wars followed GURPS and became a roll-under system too, because the math was easier than an open-ended roll. I still prefer GURPS as roll-under and Car Wars as roll-over though, there's no arguing with a 9+ to-hit on a heavy rocket and rolling double-sixes for a massive crit.

The original SBRPG was a 3d6 roll-over system.

For some things, I like roll-under and for others, roll-over. Percentile systems are classically roll-under, because the focus is different. I do not think all games have to be the same. One of the traps in being a game designer is taking your personal preferences and shoehorning them onto every other game you design or redesign.

A lot of D&D 3 came from the Magic the Gathering game. D&D 4's designers ported in some ideas from Iron Heroes and other games. D&D 5 borrows from yet others. It's not wrong to expand upon a good idea, but you need to weigh any addition against how it would fit within the original game.

One point being "healing surges" in D&D 4. D&D has classically been a game where a cleric can heal someone for X points of damage with the expenditure of a spell. In D&D 4, a cleric's healing ability used one of the target character's healing surges to heal them. If the target character was "all healed out" for the day, guess what, no heals for you. How does this make any sense with how clerics worked in the history of the game? It felt too alien, ported in from something else, and it wasn't how clerics felt their magic should work.

Porting in ideas doesn't always work or feel right within an established context. Nor does changing things too much to where things feel alien and strange given what came before. Just ask the Windows 8 team.

Can people "get" that they have to roll under a target number to succeed at an action? Yes. Does it feel good? Let me answer that with another question. How important is that feel-good of rolling high matter to your game, or does it just matter to you? Here's another thing to think about, rolling high invites open-ended dicing systems, because there are always larger positive and negative modifiers to throw around. Let's make our target number 913% and add +850% to the d100 roll!

With roll-under, you literally have 0% as your floor, and you do not want to go into negative numbers. You also get into this with d100, a 913% target number makes little sense other than being some obscenely high number you have to number-stack to reach. It means nothing percentage-wise. A 15% roll-under chance to-hit is simple, straightforward, and easily understood from anybody with a basic understanding of probability. A +10% chance to-hit modifier is also easily understandable.

Let's flip this around, and do this in a d20 roll-over system. Target number 21, and your modifier is a +3. What is your probability of success? Sure, rolling high is great now, but you have taken most people's understanding of odds and straightforward success and risk calculations out of the game. At least the average player's without some mental arithmetic. You get a further +2 to-hit, now what is your chance?

Hint: both examples are the same.

So as a game designer you ask yourself the question, do I want the "roll high" thrill, or do I want people to be immediately aware of their odds with roll-under? For certain types of games your answers will be different. For a hard-science sci-fi game, we may want percentage roll-under, because this game is supposed to be about science, odds, and the raw hard-probability chance of success. For a competitive game, like a PvP Car Wars game, roll-high is cool, since players around the table are now competing for the best and highest rolls.

If you choose roll-over, you are now opening yourself up to the unbalancing aspects of open-ended rolls. If you choose roll-under, your maximum ability scores and success chances are capped at or near 100%. There are trade offs to both approaches.

You tailor your game design decisions based on the types of behavior and feelings you want to promote at the table. One size or dice does not fit all, and roll-under or over is really a per-game decision. Never accept game design zeitgeist, and you make the right decisions for your game based on math, feel, and user experience.

D&D 5: Rolling Over & Feels Good

There always was an interesting shift between d20 and d100 for skill and task resolution. With d20 it has always been roll-over, and rolling high was a satisfying thing. With d100 it has almost always been roll-under, and rolling low was the goal.

Roll-over proponents point to the fact that rolling high is inherently satisfying, and they have a point. There is a disconnect on the target numbers that tends to blow out the dice's natural range with roll over, or a disassociation with the target numbers where the number you are trying to beat goes down.

Let's say you are doing open-ended roll-over, where you add some number to your roll, and you have to beat an ever-increasing target number. This is the system in D&D 3, where AC or DC was the target, and some monsters had AC values in the 40's and above. Think about that, you need a +20 to-hit to be able to have a chance at hitting these monsters, and all of a sudden, your original promise of a system based on 1-20 target numbers fell by the wayside.

In these systems, AC is always 10+some number, since they are basing the entire system on a 50% chance to hit. D&D 5 continues the roll over system, but it constrains the numbers tightly so nothing can really leave the +10 to hit range, instead of D&D 3 and Pathfinder's +30 and beyond.

The second roll-over system puts an ever-decreasing target number in place and tries to constrain positive numbers. You saw this in AD&D and AD&D 2, where the best to-hit in the world you could get was a 2+ on a 1d20 roll, and again, the plus to-hit was strictly limited to magic item bonuses and  ability scores.

D&D 3 introduced the concept of "level bonus" to to-hit to the d20 landscape, and this has really been with us for the last 15 years as an accepted norm of the system. D&D 4 enshrined this concept, with levels going up to 30 and to-hit bonuses going up to +12 or higher, with positive modifiers being up to +42 or higher.

With such high to-hit modifiers, the original 1-20 range of the die means nothing. There is little random chance, it's just if the designer or DM wants to make the encounter a challenge or not that is the question.

With higher levels, random chance is slowly taken out of the game.

D&D 5 tries to put the genie back in the bottle by limiting math, but this creates a system that has tenuous balance - later feats, combat moves, and items in expansion material could throw the system out of balance quickly - especially a book of high-level magic items with +3 or higher modifiers to-hit. Pretty soon, these will be highly sought-after, and soon enough, required for high-level builds because the designers are now balancing for +3 items.

There is an important game-design point hiding in here. In early editions of D&D, better to-hits were a way to increase a class' damage potential. You did not have any way to do more damage except a better to-hit. In later editions, this was also true, but class' also had built-in ways to do more damage through level-bonuses and special powers, so it meant less and it stacked upon that built-in power curve. In D&D 4, "basic attacks" sucked and were actually looked down upon as "what you did if you couldn't use a power." Yes, D&D 4 was a strange superhero game.

It is all an interesting experiment, and blowing out the d20 dice range is something D&D has been wrestling with ever since level-based increasing to-hit was introduced back in D&D 3. You can design a game where the to-hits are static and do not change, but level just brings increasing power to the table. Adding a "higher-level is a better to-hit" mechanic stacks upon that system, and once you put in a second variable like this, things become very difficult to balance.

You do need to ask yourself the serious question, what do better to-hits do in my game? Are they just for damage capability? Do they stack with other powers to increase their effect even more? Good balance comes from careful consideration.

A lot of game design is pure math, but we have been experiencing another area of "feels good" design in recent years that add powers and abilities on top of that math, which often leads to breakage of the system. "Feel good" designs come primarily from MMOs, where better and better abilities need to be given to players to keep them playing, and eventually nerfed naturally and 'expected' as players level past them, only to have another gee-whiz ability added later to keep the play-addiction cycle going.

There is actually a lot involved, which explains why MMOs constantly wrestle with balance and numbers, and D&D has been so tumultuous over the last three (four if you count D&D 3.5, and five if you count Pathfinder) editions when it came to the subject of balance, math, and keeping random chance meaningful in the game. It's not just the +to-hit, it's multi-attacks, spells, feats, powers, class abilities, and special level-added powers adding to the equation.

Micro Feats and Character Design

One of D&D 3.x's legacies on game design is an extreme granularity in character design choices. To design a character, we need to be able to choose from dozens of classes (with paths and options in each class), multi-class (with all of the choices in each class applying again), and then choose from thousands of feats as we level up to further design our character. At times it feels like creating a mobile out of coat hangers, and having one slide out of place and turning the entire system of classes with choices, multiclassing, and micro-feat choices into a mess of hanging wires.

I call them micro-feats because the feats that exist in D&D 3.x and Pathfinder are very specific and often contain small bonuses, like a +1 to some action. Because of System Mastery there are "bad and mediocre choices" sprinkled throughout the feat lists, and also there are a couple really great ones certain classes must take in order to do well - with prerequisites (power attack, cleave, great cleave). Part of me wants less, more powerful feats to simplify the mess.

It gets horrible when you toss a new monster on the table and you are sitting there cross-referencing the monster's feat list to make sure you are playing the monster right and to the monster's as-designed ability. Some of those feats are special attacks (feat), others are passives, some are defenses, and yet others are situational modifiers. I really don't like the complexity of the entire D&D 3.x legacy of character design and power distribution through class and micro-feat choices.

Look at it this way. You are designing a superhero, and put all your classes, spells, and feats in a bucket and call them equal. When you design a fantasy character, you want to make choices that matter. Clutter and tiny bonuses mean nothing, or at least they should. I want to make important choices each level, and I want my choices to be among a set of equal and great options. I should feel bad for not taking the others, and I should be saying, "Well, this was the best choice for the role I play."

Old-school games? Of course, they didn't inherit the D&D 3.x complexity for a reason, and over the years it became a huge mess as expansion after expansion unbalanced things and kept trying to right the boat with balance and options. You see that in Pathfinder in the Advanced Class Guide with the "Striker" rogue mix-class being an answer to the common complain that straight basic-book rogues can't do enough damage. Well, to patch it, let's add a new class instead of making the rogue good. Or let's add some rogue feats that let them do more damage. Or let's just do everything and let players sort it out.

You can never balance a complex granular system. You can only make it better through iterations, and that requires you to throw out everything you've done previously. Rogue 3.0 sucks? Well, let's improve him in 4.0. Or let's try again in 3.75. Or make another sub-class that does what we want the rogue to do. Or let's do it again in 5.0. It feels like why we are going through multiple D&D versions right now, and why they chose to hit the reset button in D&D 5. It feels like a reset and new starting point though, and I hope they don't go back to class and feat bloat like they did in the 3.x years.

I think bloat is one of the big threats to D&D 5. If they don't print as much junk, make all options equal and good choices, the game will last longer and be seen as a stable point in the game's history.

Why care? Well, the average person who plays casual games doesn't care for a game with around two or three thousand feat choices, some good, many bad, and they need to study forums and class build guides like a PhD to get their character right. Hardcore gamers? We eat that stuff up. There's a divide there, and yes, I am on one side, but I can see the other and I know the pain casual gamers have with our hobby. You can't be blinded by your own preferences and likes to not see other's pain and discomfort.

Plus it feels like we are throwing a lot of work out. I like to buy games that stick around a while, and I hate versioning everything up. Yes, if you count backwards compatibility, D&D 3 is still sticking around in Pathfinder, but it keeps the same problems that a granular system mastery based designed game comes with.

So where do you go if you like simple, equal choices? D&D 5 is a tenuous 'we shall see' option, and in an oblique way the Pathfinder Beginner Box is another option (but not really an answer). The old-school games like Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy are always an option, and they kind of dodge the question by making all the choices for you.

I still like Pathfinder a lot, but when I am shuffling through pages of print outs to play three or four NPCs and monsters on one side of a battle I don't like it, and I know I'm missing applying several feats and abilities I know they have, but I can't because I need to keep this game running fast and fun for the players. Some of this you learn, but it all seems so heavy just to play what should be a simple fantasy game. It's a beautifully wonderful complex game I love, but its complexity kills it from being played in casual settings for me as a DM. For new players, I'll pick an old-school game or something simple and just focus on having fun.

D&D 5? I can't say, I need all three books before I can truly say the game's complexity, balance, and ease-of-play lives up to the hype. Without the complete monster list, I can't say how complex they are to run overall, and there's the fight-length and balance issue. Without the DMG, I can't say much about recommended encounter balance, rewards, and the optional complexity introduced there. We will know more in about two months.