B/X Essentials

B/X Essentials! These are fun little books I found over on DriveThruRPG, and they are essentially a core rules set for B/X games split up into modular books. There are three of them out, and a fourth one is in the works covering monsters. Right now, there is a book for the base rules, a book for classes, and a book for spells (covering cleric 1-5 and MU 1-6). These are kind of what I wanted from the old D&D Essentials guides but never got.

Why another set of B/X rules? Why not? At this point, B/X is the closest thing the pen-and-paper gaming world has to UNIX/LINUX, with many different distributions and flavors available and they will be in print and be around forever due to the OGL.

What is cool about B/X is that it all works really similar to each other, adventures mostly are compatible, classes play alike, and even the math is more or less similar no matter what you play. You factor in things like the special features of a game, support, class books, and other flavor related items and you pick a favorite version and play. You could play in another game with a different B/X system and still know most of what you need to know.

The goal (as I read it) here is to publish a setting-neutral base game where you could use the framework to create any B/X flavored game from (or use to play the original), and more importantly kind of be a version-neutral reference guide and clean up the original B/X rules. These are noble goals, and let's say I wanted to make a sci-fi B/X style game. My options? Recreate the wheel and craft a new variant B/X system, or extend an already-published B/X clone like Labyrinth Lord. This is a third option, start with this and have just the basics, and then extend as much as you want in any direction.

I could also play a simple dungeon game just using these rules and be fine. It is all cool.

There is a text-only version of these for free, and you can pick up some printed books and the full-art PDF for cheap, which I did because I want to support this effort (and they are cool books). The art is very flavorful and cool in these books, I love the varied styles and humor here, and it does feel true to the old-school feeling of B/X and OSR.

I like this, sort of a setting-neutral and modular approach to B/X. I still like my Labyrinth Lord collection and that game is one I love and have an investment in, but I share the feeling sometimes all I want is just something simple, something basic, and something which doesn't start with the fantasy assumption and sits there like a blank canvas for my creations.

Make a B/X style gangster Noir game? Why not? This gives me a great basic rules set without all the fantasy baggage and my plate is clear to create a classes, equipment, and setting book covering the parts that are different in my creation. The base rulebook doesn't need to be touched, and all you need to play is Core plus the setting-specific book. You don't need to worry about ignoring clerics, magic wands, and orcs when you are out clinging to the running board of your Packard sedan with a tommygun in hand - you have the base rules and your setting specific book and you are all set.

There is nothing to ignore here and you can focus your playing and designing just on the world you create, and I love that modular design goal here. This is a cool effort, I am happily awaiting the monster book (which is in proofreading now and should be out soon), and I will continue to support this effort because I love B/X and the more the OSR the merrier.

Great Article: ‘D&D BEYOND’...

Check this out:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/inside-dungeons-and-dragons-beyond/

This is an article about the new digital tools suite for D&D 5 and it looks pretty slick. I have HeroLab for Pathfinder, and that program has become the only way to play for us. I want to check this software suite out and see what it can do for my group - so, nicely done and written - thank you!

Now, my thoughts and feelings. The problem I have with both Pathfinder and D&D is the character generation time, even in the article, they mention it took a GM and seven players three hours to create a party of characters. Even the author says it takes him 30 to 45 minutes to create a character by himself, and that is with proficient rules knowledge.

And here I was thinking Pathfinder was the one that took a lot of time, and that D&D 5 was actually faster. I guess as time goes on, those 'critical path' choices become clear and the game's balance and mechanics push players more towards 'good choices' for combat and critical game activities. It is like hard drive space in a way, you always find a way to use it all up no matter how much you have. In pen-and-paper games, character generation time seems to go up to an hour no matter how hard the designers try to streamline.

I have been through those 'where did the three hours go' character generation sessions way too many times, and it is hard to get players to go through that and come back the next week. In my feeling, it throws a huge wet blanket over that first, magical 'getting started' session that should be about adventure and having fun, not filling out a character sheet the length of a tax form and then having to come back the next week to see if you made the right choices.

Yes, pre-generated characters help - but they take the critical 'player creative input' out of the game. We are in an age of 64-bit smartphones that do amazing things and connect the world, how hard could it be to design a rules system that gets you started in 5 minutes?

In a perfect world, I would never use a computer program to wrangle complex character creation systems, and it could all be done as we did it when the game started. Throw 3d6 in six scores, pick a race, pick a class, grab some gear, and go.

The simplicity of the retro-clones calls to me, I know.

But the new games allow so much customization!

True, but unlimited choice is not always a good thing in games nor in life. It can paralyze and cause people to not choose anything rather than make a choice and go with it. I would rather have my complexity creep in after level one (in character advancement) than force it on players before they get started with the game.

Just my feelings of course, and I still appreciate robust character design systems - but there is a point where I feel complexity starts hurting the 'new player experience' and also play-ability.

It is why my shelf still holds a nice collection of retro-clones and they continue to inspire me to this day. Sometimes the original ways we did things need some respect and study, and that those simple times had a merit of their own.

Pathfinder: Ultimate Intrigue

So, Pathfinder: Ultimate Intrigue?

I feel this one is mostly a mess. It shows some of the worst failings of the d20 system in rules design, and attempts to rules-ify and feat-ify basic "I do this and I say that" roleplaying. What should be in-character banter between the player and referee is slogged down by rules, stat-blocks, and game systems.

DM judgement and player creativity are replaced by book reference and rules structure. It feels terrible, especially when compared with the elegance of other systems in these situations like Savage Worlds or FATE.

Why? Because what this book forces you to do is buy feats and sink character points into skills that take away from combat, which many players will not want to do. There is little support for 'well rounded' characters in most d20 systems, as you are making choices between "combat effectiveness" and "non-combat ability" every level, and combat effectiveness usually wins. You must keep up with the Jones' - aka, the monsters and opponents of the world, so choosing "combat" is typically the safer way to go.

So now, what should be "handle it with roleplaying" is now "we can build characters around social combat rules" and I feel something huge is lost here. If a player, without a character with a social build, roleplays wonderfully in a Game of Thrones moment of drama and heartfelt appeal - am I supposed to coldly refer to the rules, state they do not have the feats to make such an appeal, and deny the roleplaying based on a failing of "social combat?"

Please, d20 game designers, stick to combat rules, which the d20 system does well. Keep the rules out of the roleplaying area, and let people play. I feel anytime designers try to make d20 do something other than combat it usually results in a complicated mess of charts and rules that takes the fun out of the game (there are a couple exceptions of d20 designs that do this well, but not D&D as a whole). Especially if you start putting a "social feat tax" on characters who want to be social, and now they suck when standing in a party alongside the established builds and highly-tuned killing machines the game has gotten us used to.

If these options were in the game on the ground floor, I could feel differently, since the default assumption would be "you build balanced characters for combat and social play." But still, creating strict rules for social roleplay feels so backwards and against the spirit of the hobby I sit here and wonder why.

I want to play a diplomat who is just as good with a sword as the fighter is, and I want my diplomat to feel like he or she can contribute equally when in combat or out of it. Making me lose combat effectiveness just because I want my character to be talky takes away from the fun of the game, and it further pushes apart the "roleplay" players from the "combat" players when the game should bring them together.

To the book's credit, it provides some new character archetypes and  build options that are fun, but the whole notion of creating a class around a Batman-like "secret identity" vigilante seems odd. My rogue or mage could have a secret identity too, you know. I could even have my mage or rogue be a vigilante. Seriously. I don't need this level of classification, and I don't need making every job-based noun a character class. The build options are fun though, and the art is pretty.

Why give all these social rules for roleplaying, and then give us hundreds of spells meant to short-circuit it? We have spells to sense lies and motives, make others seem as dishonest, and all sorts of other spells which feel like they are "quick and easy outs" for mages in social situations. Why go through a whole Sherlock Holmes adventure interrogating suspects, putting together clues, and figuring out who has the motive to lie about who killed Mr. Boddy when this complete spellbook of "forensic lie detection" powers can do the same with the wave of a magic wand? The very thing the book tries to do, create a framework for social adventures, feels marginalized by the spells in the back of the book.

Seriously. If we are trying to find out the killer, are we going to go through the detective work, or just have someone cast a spell?

Someone cast the spell and let's get on to the next combat encounter. Yes, the book says "magic is frowned upon in polite company," but really? Bust out the lie-detector, we are trying to save the world here. Divination is already a huge deal-breaker when it comes to D&D and mystery games, and after this book's spells are introduced into the mix, running social and intrigue games feels worse. Yes, there are some tricky counter-counter spells in here meant to counter divination, but I don't want to play a game of divination-counter escalation and spell-counter-spell when doing the Sherlock Holmes thing.

And not in every mystery because it feels forced and artificial. Who done it? Whoever can cast the anti-divination and social magic is a prime suspect.

Other games do this better. If I want to play mystery and social, Pathfinder is not my first choice nor would I want it to be (see Divination magic, above). I expected a "how to run a mystery" or "how to create a social adventure" type material, and it feels like we just got a bunch of misguided rules that will be ignored because:

• People who play the game for tactical challenge will ignore
• People who play the game for roleplaying will feel burdened by
• Referees who are used to rewarding great roleplaying will ignore

And the rules drive these two groups apart instead of bring them together. You force social characters down a path buying social feats and powers (making them weaker when playing with the other side), and you put combat characters on their well-trodden path down of combat effectiveness (and also the path the game is balanced around).

There are times when I feel the old-school games of "roleplay is up to the players and referee" is the best way to go. If you need a stat that affects the chance of success, let it be charisma, and leave it at that. No feats needed. No skills needed. No rules or charts needed. Just your CHR modifier, and of course, the referee's judgement based on what you just said, how the NPC feels, and what is being asked for.

Come up with a DC, add your CHR modifier, and roll.

Pathfinder as Skyrim

This to me sums up my feelings about Pathfinder and its current state nicely. Having modded Skyrim with over 230 mods, creating merge patches, bash patches, leveled lists, and all sort of other techo-wizardry, I have my custom version of Skyrim running well with all sorts of lovable insanity happening on the roads and wilds of this maniac world, with unpredictable chaos happening around every bend and strange dungeons in places one would never expect. There is also the enemy of survival against the bitter cold, where a lack of preparation against the elements can kill you just as easily as a unique and named draugr in a crypt somewhere.

It is also a finely tuned custom game, with over a year and eighteen versions tested and improved upon, there are mods we like and those we don't, some that are heavy and others that are not, and lots of tweaks and settings to get it working just the way we like things. Modding Skyrim is a hobby for us, much like one would take up model railroading, and the results are satisfying and tragically chaotic and wonderful as we get hours of enjoyment out of that game.

I should say yes, we are looking forward to Fallout 4 and the mods there. We have a similarly modded version of Fallout 3 we have yet to explore, so we have plenty to play with and we are patient. I do look forward to the modding community of Fallout 4 and eagerly await the wonderful pieces they put together there for us to assemble and use in our mod collections.

Pathfinder is the same way for us. Heavily modified with books like 1001 Spells, Deep Magic, and other class compendiums (supported by the wonderful Hero Builder program) it is a big-tent game with options we would never, ever get to explore in a thousand lifetimes, but they are all there for us to enjoy and wander through. Books like Rise of the Drow, third party mega-dungeons, and others make our world a unique place, not exactly how Paizo ships it, but recognizable enough on the surface, much like Skyrim's cold and bitter lands when modded and tweaked with new dungeons and environs. Five monster bestiaries, plus many third party ones make our world a dangerous and unique place filled with the unexpected and unknown. It is as heavily tweaked and customized as our Skyrim version, the modding of the pen-and-paper world and its rules systems every bit as carefully crafted as our electronic world.

D&D 5, at this point, feels a bit like Diablo 3 to us. A fun game, but up until this point it is pretty much the same experience as everybody else's world, minus the stories and unique choices every group makes. The starting point is the same, and while yes you can customize, there simply isn't the fun options that out Pathfinder game has been crafted with over the years. Also, like Diablo 3, D&D 5 is a game that you can easily jump into, so there is that 'instant fun' factor that comes into play. Skyrim, like Pathfinder, can be a complicated beast prone to bugs and finicky problems, but once you get it running great, nothing else comes close in options or the random, chaotic world filled with enemies that pull powers and deadly attacks and combos from books players never had the idea they were coming from. Of course, with D&D 5 it is early, and they just released the game's core under the OGL, so time will tell what we have to play with in the future.

With Pathfinder, if it is published somewhere and included in our 'mod mix' it is fair game, so it takes a special player (and referee) to survive and excel in this environment. With this amount of mixed up madness, you can bet there are exploits, but part of the fun is finding the cheese and house-ruling a fix, just as we would come up with a way to make two conflicting Skyrim mods find a way to work together without breaking things. We are mature enough to know if something is really broken that it needs to be fixed or outright ignored, usually the former, but sometimes the latter and we will revisit it in a later version of the game by removing books or option we don't like, just like a pesky Skyrim mod that never seems to play well with others (randomized and increased world spawns and incredibly long load times in Skyrim).

With us, it is not the question of 'which game is better' for us, it is a question of modding and which game is the better hobby for us. Right now, Pathfinder is our modding game of choice. D&D 5 is a good pick-up-and-play game, but then again, so are many of the retro-clones as well, such as Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord. It is about choice for us, really, and part of the hobby of this game is modding and tweaking, which we enjoy just as well as playing.

D&D 5 Goes OGL Update

Check this out:

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2t8sr&page=1?DD-5th-Edition-OGL

This is a fascinating discussion of the D&D 5 OGL release, and I encourage you to check it out and participate. Some of the posters brought up some interesting facts about the 5E SRD, namely it is missing a bunch of feats, spells, backgrounds, and other content. Some of this was an oversight (and will be corrected, thank you Wizards again), and other parts are because the items in question are product identity.

It brings up an interesting question about usability and forking.

Without everything in an SRD, designers may clone the missing parts to make a functional game from the SRD. This happened with the 3.0 SRD, and we have a forked product (see any of the retro clones, Pathfinder, and so on). It reminds me of the current OpenOffice and LibreOffice relationship in a way if you are familiar with that, you have one that is controlled by an entity, and another that is controlled by a community.

Will Wizards find a way to license the missing pieces so they can be used in a convenient way? I am sure their new PDF sales site is a way around all this, while delivering a OGL version gives indie designers enough to work with to create games from the main rules. It is a good solution to open up the parts you want to make compatible and the generic systems without giving away the farm, so Wizards still deserves a heap of praise for being so open and bringing back the OGL for 5E.

You can still build a 5E-like game with this SRD. Getting an open-source "plays like D&D" version out of this with all the mechanical parts, but it feels a little less possible than the 3E SRD version. You can get there, but it is going to require a lot of new content that will be under the OGL. It won't exactly be D&D with all the cool powers though.

It is partly because 5E is a very tightly-tuned game, with lots of stuff in it that is custom to the Wizards settings. It's a good thing and a bad thing I suppose, since I like rules that are closer to the source material, but that makes the system a little less generic. An OGL "5E compatible" game will play like D&D, but it won't be D&D down to the spells, classes, feats, and other parts.

The forking issue is an interesting question. Will a fan-supported version of the game pop up with 100% open content? The forking question is interesting, because something supported by a community feels like it has more energy and community impetus behind it. I don't know. I would love to see a retro-clone based on 5E style play, or wait, isn't that 5E itself? Then again, any fork has to compete with the official game, so there is that issue. The 3.0 SRD is out there and also well-understood and used, so there is another angle here worth thinking about.

It is a problem which time may fix as Wizards revises the document and comes up with other ways of licensing things. I would love to have an additional "product identity" license and open-ish reference source for the missing material, but then again, I would like them under the OGL. But then again, I understand why they aren't there. Another part of me says, "why are they worrying about all this? They are D&D!" It is an interesting conflict and set of conundrums around this release, and I am sure it will all get worked out in some way.

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.

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.

Basic Fantasy: Seriously Impressive Value

Did you see these? Amazon has the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game 3rd Edition for $5.

Five dollars.

This is a complete game book for five bucks. Yes, it isn't 1980 anymore, this is 2015, and this is a seriously great value for such a great retro-clone old-school game.

Did you see the monster expansion for Basic Fantasy?

Oh yes, and this one is 180 monsters in the The Basic Fantasy Field Guide for under four dollars.

Seriously, what in the roleplaying world is going on? Four dollars?

Ordered.

For those of you in the know, Basic Fantasy is a retro-clone that keeps the best parts of D&D 3.5 and throws the rest of the complicated parts away. It uses a D&D 3.5 style rising AC and target number where the monster's AC is the to-hit target number, yet clones most of the original D&D spells, feeling, and flavor. It is a seriously cool game that gets back to the hobby's roots, is simple, and most importantly...

Look at those prices.

You can download the PDF of the main rules for free, so this game is great for groups that want to play something yet not invest a lot of money in expensive books. Does it bother me that this isn't D&D 5? Not in the least, and in fact, I welcome a return to the old days in spirit and feeling, where dungeoning was deadly, your ability to pry room descriptions out of the referee in real life gave you a better chance of survival, and you didn't need rules longer than an IRS tax form. I love the old-school rules and feeling of freedom in both refereeing and playing.

Your real-life wits mattered, not your character build.

Best of all, the old-school rules this was inspired by came before the influence of videogames and MMOs which tainted our hobby. It is purist, it is old-school cool, and it is cleaned up slightly with some sane compromises that old-school D&D should have had.

Think of it as a sort of classic-retro Monopoly sort of game where you are playing the game as it was meant to be and you'll get it, and can sell it better to players.

You know what's better?

I picked up six modules for under four bucks each in my order. Take a look at these:

Morgansfort, a starting base adventure module for under four bucks. This reminds me of the old "Keep on the Somewhere" style modules that gives a party of adventurers a home base with some intrigue, inns, shops, NPCs, and other necessities that allow the party to have a home when they aren't out dungeoning. Seventy pages too, which puts it just a little under the size of a Pathfinder adventure path installment.

The Chaotic Caves, a sandbox style starter module that mimics some of the old 'pack in' starter modules of the old D&D game. For under four bucks you get a starter module that gives you that 'just starting out' experience.

How about Adventure Anthology 1? Four dollars for fourteen short adventures? Or Fortress, Tomb, and Tower: The Glain Campaign a three-adventure campaign for under four dollars? Or Tales from the Laughing Dragon: A Dragonclaw Adventure, another three adventure complimation for under four dollars? Or even Monkey Isle, a savage-island style wilderness exploration adventure for under four dollars?

Eight books for about thirty dollars? Mind you, most of this is content for the game master in 352 pages of adventures and campaign locations, and there is a 170 page rulebook (with free PDFs) for the players. About 70 pages of the basic book are monsters (with the rules being about 100 pages long), plus an additional 84 in the monster expansion for about 154 pages of monsters. All this for a grand total of 606 pages of fun for the price of one D&D 5 or Pathfinder rulebook is a great deal.

Considering all the play time you will get out of these, it is like picking up a classic retro game collection on Steam and having months worth of material to play with. Yes, you need players that are interested, but sometimes a deluge of releases like this at these prices can attract an interest all their own.

This is what I like to see, the old-school community seriously stepping up and putting great stuff in stores like Amazon at prices that shock the customer. This is how old-school competes with the thirty-dollar (fifty retail) art-book games that continually try to redefine what the original editions got right in numbers, simplicity, and feeling the first time.

Who would have know that 2015 was going to give us some very cool old-school gaming surprises such as this? This is very cool stuff, and worth supporting and playing.

Free and Open Means Community

Being a creator, it is difficult to be creative in games which do not have open licenses for third-party content. This was a problem I had with 4th Edition D&D, and it is currently a problem with 5th Edition D&D (though OGL was spoke of by the team, to be fair).

If I build something, naturally I want to share it, for profit or not. I remember TSR AD&D and 2E with the silliness third party publishers (and even individuals) had to go through to make compatible content, and that is a time that is 15 years ago and thankfully over with, for the most part.

And then by some miracle we got the OGL and SRD, and it was mostly a good thing (save for electronic and game publishing). It was great, and the Open Gaming license today survives and thrives with many game, a lot having nothing to do with d20 or D&D. It was a gift that kept giving, and it continues to give today.

I seriously think 5th Edition could have been put out with full OGL and SRD support, just like 3rd Edition and they would have seen the same or even greater success. D&D is what it is, there's no taking that away, and being open and compatible from the start would have just won over many and led the industry again.

I like Legend, and I love the thought at being able to use that system to build an entirely new game from - that is cool. I like Pathfinder and the OGL/SRD, and I can share my ideas and even sell them if people become fans and want to support the idea.

I like the OGL/SRD retro-clones, those are exciting and cool as well.

I love all the games with open licensing, like Traveller and others - these are great developments and gifts to the gaming world.

I want to be someone who does more than buys and plays a game, I want games that I can share my creativity with the world. I'm finding myself drawn to those and playing those more than I do my collection of "play only" games. When you buy an open-license game, you are becoming a part of a community of creators and players - and not just players. I find more and more the community matters, and fostering a large and vibrant creative community is where I like to spend my gaming time.

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.

D&D 5: Dungeon Master's Guide

So my next-gen set is complete with the D&D 5 Dungeon Master's Guide. Thoughts?

It is a nicely put-together book, with so much art inside it almost feels like one of those coffee table art books you used to buy around Christmas time. Part of me feel like this is a tribute book to the original AD&D DMG, as many of the familiar elements are present, the sample dungeon, the random tables, the structure of the book, and even random dungeon generation.

As a DMG, it works and delivers the information you need to play the game. Surprisingly, higher-level magic items are present (to around a +3), and this continues the strict control of numbers and roll ranges the game is based upon.

The create-a-monster system is back from 4th Edition, and this is a good thing. I like being able to come up with challenges on-the-fly for anything in my world, so a quick-stat system is essential for how I play. There are sections for NPCs and the like as well, which helps as well.

I liked most of the art, and I think this is the book's greatest strength, inspiring dungeon masters. They do a good job here.

The D&D cosmology of the planes is back and one of the first things in the book, and I don't know, I am tired of the typical D&D plane-hopping focus by now. They tore up the planar structure with 4th Edition, and in 5th Edition they try to present alternatives while still keeping in the basic D&D wheel framework. To me, I am growing out of the need for "star hopping" planar adventures, and they do not really attract or excite me anymore.

I need to explain this further, yes, but to me, having a billion planes to visit takes away so much focus from the game world it makes the primary world feel unimportant and small. D&D 4 was bad enough that they assumed you started plane hopping at 10th level. With fantasy being inspired by Game of Thrones and other "single world" epics, being able to hop around to entirely different worlds just removes the tension and 'cage match' feel for the original world. Who cares about never having a safe haven in the game world when you could just leave the world and live somewhere else? What does it matter the orcs have setup a war camp in the next valley over when you are off on some plane-hopping excursion?

To me, either you go all planes or no planes, with none being my preference since I like strong and important game worlds. To be fair, they allow for this option, but I dislike the familiar D&D planar structure and it's been so well trodden and it is built to open the door to rampant god-meddling (by both players and gods) that I am really looking for something different in my fantasy experience nowadays.

There are rumors of the OGL returning to this edition, but we haven't heard much more on this yet, but nothing concrete. This would be another good step, but I want to see something official before making a commitment and heaping praise. Promises are not action, and a full and unrestricted OGL is something that needs to happen in D&D 5.

There are also rumors that Wizards is trying to keep the yearly flood of books to a manageable level. Pathfinder and 4th Edition both tired me out with that constant arms race of desktop publishing creations, and I am frankly not in the collector's market mood of buying books to never use them much more nowadays. This is another good move to recognize you can over-publish your system into un-play-ability, and they deserve some kudos for this intention of self-control. Books being sales and revenue, we will see how well this works out, but I like the plan.

We also have a major old-school focus and vibe with this version of D&D, and this is likely a reaction to the old-school resurgence of games like Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, and others. Those games are still free in their complete forms and widely available, so rather than dropping $100 to $150 dollars on this set of books (while nice and pretty and new), the OGR/OSR games are still a widely better value and still worthy of play and support. I know this is probably heresy to say because this edition is nice and giving us a lot of what we wanted; but really, I still support the free and open old-school games out there as a matter of principle, and they still occupy proud and prominent positions on my shelves.

So D&D 5 is a throwback game inspired by the classics while still retaining some modern design sensibilities. It isn't as map-focused as I'd like, since one thing I liked about D&D 4 was it could sit right beside Warmachine and Warhammer as a respected and tactical tabletop experience. You could say D&D 4 was a better version of D&D Miniatures. This is different, it is back to the story telling roots of the hobby, and that isn't a bad thing. If you are just getting started with D&D, this is a good option along with the OGR games.

To me, I battle with my exhaustion with the D&D cosmos. I've been at this since the first books, and I have had to restart my D&D experience and outlook with every major revision. Third, fourth and now fifth have all been major revisions, and it is getting hard to get excited about starting all over again, only this time with more of the same. It is the classic "get there from here" syndrome. For my group, the old-school games fill the niche of the 'classic D&D' experience. D&D 5 going back to its roots is a good thing, but I have been playing the old-school for a while now with some of the games that have kept the old-school torch burning, and aren't loaded up with the plane-hopping focus I am a bit weary of now.

So in short, a good job and a solid book to finish the series. I like the classic focus of D&D 5, but I am in a position where I want something new and compelling to excite me. It feels like a reboot movie in a way, while I like to see a new team's take on a classic franchise, they still haven't convinced me that I should pour myself into the experience and buy in yet. A lot of the elements are there, but I need that extra something else to get excited about. It's ultimately like an operating system or game console to me, while it is a cool piece of hardware, it's the games on it that matter.

And yes, I know we make the games, but I would love to see something new and exciting come out of the 5E team - something to make D&D their own, like a new world or mythos to pull their design together. Eberron had it for 3.5E, Faerun had it for 2E, and even Grayhawk had it for AD&D. I know this isn't likely, but for a new direction and take on the game, I always love to see something new and fresh come from the creative team behind the game.

I'm still waiting for that AAA experience here, but good job on the base system.

D&D 5 vs. Pathfinder: Magic Systems

As I read through D&D 5's magic spells I am struck by one thing, and I have saw this in our "Fun With D&D 5 Magic" series. D&D 5's spells all seem very version 1.0, they can be exploited with combos or special tricks, have huge area of effects, infinite-cast cantrips give immunity to all forms of melee damage, and there are just a lot of ways to abuse these spells. They require a different way of thinking about magic and powers, and they do have a D&D 4 magic rethink feeling to them.

D&D 5 puts the dungeon master squarely back in control of the rules though, so a lot of these exploits are "to be denied" by the dungeon master when they come up. It puts a burden on the referee, but it gives the game a more old-school and freewheeling feel.

DarkgarX has an issue with calling these "old school" style spells, and he fought me on this point. He's partially right, but I still think they are old-school inspired. His reasoning is that these are spells designed with more modern design techniques and considerations.

In comparison, the majority of the spells for Pathfinder were created under the OGL in the year 2000 when D&D 3 came out. These spells were revised and balanced under D&D 3.5, and then again for Pathfinder. So the D&D 3.x to Pathfinder line of spells have been balanced, used, and playtested for about fourteen years. These were the original spells created by the Magic the Gathering type team at Wizards, so they were crafted with a new level of balance and usability in mind.

D&D split from D&D back in the 3.0 days with AD&D 2.0 being the last faithful version, and it turned into a highly tuned Magic the Gathering style roleplaying game. Pathfinder is that MtG RPG nowadays, and true D&D continues on with D&D 5 and also the retro-clones like Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy RPG.

It is an interesting lineage, and the Pathfinder spells are clearly better designed, streamlined, and balanced. If you read Pathfinder spells and compare them to their D&D 5 counterparts (reverse gravity, etc), I feel the Pathfinder spells are just a better designed and working set of magic powers as a whole. The D&D 5 spells are simple and easier to use in a more casual setting, but the Pathfinder magic spell set has been beat up, used, and exploited for a long, long time, so they feel like they have been through the battle and they work very well.

Yes, in both these games casters are very powerful, but that's just the world we live in. The point is, they are powerful enough, giving them a set of spells that feel like a step backwards before D&D 3.0 in balance with exploits makes these wizards even more powerful. Magic has always been a headache for referees, and I prefer a set of spells that have been used for the last 14 years and most of the bugs worked out. They just feel like better working spells to me.

Part of me would like to see D&D 5 errata that corrects some of this, but then again, part of me doesn't. I am tired of errata, and D&D 4 has soured me to the entire concept where I would rather play a semi-broken "rules as written" game from my books than have error-filled books and pages of printouts with corrections to cross reference. With D&D 4, there was so much errata if felt like the game kept changing, and there was a version in there we liked, but it was patched and fixed to a point where we didn't recognize the game after a point and we just quit.

Pathfinder has errata, yes, but at least I can keep my PDFs and Hero Lab up to date, and that is what I play with anyways. I love my books, but I play with the most up-to-date electronic copies. There is a clear benefit to Paizo's PDF-centric business model for players and referees, and I support it because it makes my gaming life easy.

So I will take the D&D 5 spells in all their sort of silly, unbalanced, and exploitable forms as they are, and just chalk it up to "this is how this world works." The books I buy for this game are it for my group, and I am not buying into errata or character generators that are different to what I have on paper. I'm not interested in a D&D 5.5 later on either.

Besides, old-school magic is supposed to be and exploitable and rules-less Wild West to an extent, and those referee headaches are part of the fun for players. It does turn the game into a "gotcha" sort of simulator, where the referee makes monsters use the same magic spell exploits on the characters, but coming from Basic Fantasy RPG and Labyrinth Lord, I am used to that. There is a sort of freewheeling fun to it, so it is not a problem for me because I understand where it's coming from. D&D 5 is more of a casual RPG, and a lot is left to the referee. It's cool and I actually have a place at my table for that sort of game.

If I am playing seriously, like in a tournament or a setting where rules disagreements could affect the outcome of a competitive game? I feel I will stick with Pathfinder. In these settings and organized play, I want rules and powers that have been beat up a little bit and have all the problems worked out. There are still problems with balance in many spells, yes, but overall, Pathfinder may be a little more complex, but this complexity came out of the years of using the system. There is also a fairness in having rules for everything that protects organized play that I appreciate, and this design mentality goes all the way back to Pathfinder's sort of Magic the Gathering roots.

D&D 4E Character Builds: Pay to Win?

This is not an article about D&D4 when you play by the first three books (DMG, PH, MM), this is an article about playing D&D4 as it was intended, with all books and options on the table. The game has expanded to include thousands of powers, feats, and equipment choices for each class, so complicated it practically requires the D&D Insider computer program to get a character design correct and ready for play. Add in the tsunami of rules errata for each and every book, and approximately a quarter of the powers and items, and there's no way to generate a 'legal' character without the program.

Of course, you can still play the game without using the program, and hobble along from book-to-book picking powers and building a character. For many of the groups we played with, the time needed to get six players together, through all the books, questions answered, and characters built took an entire session, and even then most players made huge mistakes in creating their characters mostly due to the volume of material involved. We started out with the by-hand method, we enjoyed the tone and flavor of the first three books, and also built a lot of characters by hand.  Of course, with just three books to worry about (and one PH), it was simple.

Wizards built D&D4 with powers, feats, and items to exactly mirror the Magic Card format. Each power, item, and feat is its own self-contained card of rules, and there are literally thousands of them, with many revised. In the end, you ended up dealing with something like a huge box of Magic Cards in complexity, and in-play, it introduced a certain type of choice paralysis among our groups. Similarly, many of the powers were slight variations of each other, meant to ensure a certain power type could be used more than once per encounter (all the melee-shift-rogue powers come to mind, plus many others). There are too many powers that are too similar to each other, but that is for another day, another discussion.

Along comes the D&D Insider program, which became the de-facto way to generate a character. It's a great service, and keeps you organized, your characters in one place, and all your rules up-to-date. It also became the only way to play for our groups. Creating characters by hand took too long, and the mistakes made brought the game to a halt when a player discovered their character wasn't right. It was a negative experience for the player, since the player wanted to do the right thing, but preferred the by-hand system. After a while, players didn't like the online generator, because they felt it was the only way to go, and they liked using the books. We also ran into the online program taking longer and longer to use, since the options increased as you leveled up.

For play time, the online character generator was the only way to go - maintaining characters by hand simply took away all of our play time and was too error-prone to even consider (especially for new players). Clearly, the game is to blame here, and this is one of the major mistakes in D&D4. The designers wanted that 'Magic Card' vibe when it came to selecting powers and gear, and they even printed 'power cards' intended to make this easier (and those got outmoded with errata to an extent). This created a necessity to use the program to save time for play, players that used it were happier, did better, and had a more enjoyable play experience at the table.

If that sounds like a pay-to-win game, it sort of does. You are paying for the premium experience, of course, but players who didn't pay ended up with a net negative experience with the game. In most pay-to-win games, you can at least stumble along with the freebies, but your experience is still marginally positive. Here it seems like that, or a little worse off for non-paying players, especially when you get a mix of paying and non-paying at the same table. The differences between the two types of players were striking, and there were issues between paying players who had correct designs, and those who did it by the books and were playing with incorrect and sometimes characters with errata issues. A paying player saying 'oh, it doesn't work that way now' to a non-paying one was the kiss of death to about a half-hour of play-time every time it happened.

Now yes, the service helped, so it had value and was worth paying for. Something in the back of my mind wonders what would happen if the game was easier to play, easier to build characters with, and didn't require such a huge character generator to begin with? The game design of D&D4 in respect to character builds made the D&D Insider service a necessity, and in a way, it fostered the complexity of the game. You could have had the same D&D4 experience with less complexity, but of course, there wouldn't be a need to pay for D&D Insider either. Yes, it's totally within Wizard's right to get subscription fees for a value-add service, but part of me wonders if this was the right way of going about that.

The problem was, you didn't need the books, they were errata'ed away, all you needed was D&D Insider. If you didn't like the program, or you lapsed from playing and cancelled your D&D Insider subscription - you were out. There wasn't a great way to get back into playing without reactivating your account, and it felt like your characters were locked away behind a paywall. It was easier to play another game without the onerous character generation requirements than it was to get back into the program, find out most of your character designs were changed by errata and had to be redesigned, and deal with the constant attention a D&D4 character required.

For many, Pathfinder or the OGR clones provided an escape to a simpler time where you could design a character by hand, and many went that way. Of course, Pathfinder is less simple nowadays for other reasons, and that is another topic for another day. Many other RPGs provide that simple experience, and the interest in D&D4 faded away in our group. People just wanted to show up and have fun, and the stacks of Magic Card like powers and gear got in the way, the character designer becoming the focus of the negative experience.

If it were up to me, character generation would be free and open - anyone should be able to log in and use the service. After all, you want people to create all sorts of fun character designs and dream about the possibilities. What I would pay a subscription fee for is a place to meet up and play, for a RPG-focused social network with virtual tabletops, hangouts, adventure creation and tracking, and yes, a place to share characters, stories, and achievements. I would pay to unlock maps of worlds, party tracking, wikis, and adventures to play online. It seems Wizards went in the wrong direction, locking up characters behind the paywall. To me, it would have made a lot more sense keeping the characters simple, and making the value-add proposition the place to come and play the game with fans around the world.

The Tyranny of the Whiteboard

The latest spat between the XBox1 and the Playstation 4 got me thinking, especially under the topic of used games. Now yes, I know this doesn't have much to do with pen-and-paper, but stick with me, it will in a moment. I'm not looking to start a flame war between PS4 and XB1 fans, just make a point.

Microsoft seems like they lost touch. Clearly, their odd restrictions on used games with publishers being allowed to allow or disallow this, and the further limit on 'who' gets to sell used games is just strange beyond belief. Then add the strange 'games can only be traded once' deal, the Internet requirement anywhere from a day to each hour depending on where you are, and all of a sudden, your users have it worse off than the game pirates. Yes, the restrictions are like Steam, but Steam is even freer than this, and plus Steam wins on price every time.

With the PS4, it's easy, Trade your game, sell it to anyone, rent them (a huge casualty in the XB1, no Redbox or Gamefly), but pre-owned, trade them in for the next year's big thing - whatever. Oh yeah, I expect publishers to continue the practice of downloadable pay-per extra content and online passes, but that's their choice and not forced on us as gamers. The system is kept simple, free from online activation, some sort of trading scheme, or any other artificial limit - things work like they always did.

I've been in this place before, it's called a corporate meeting room with a giant whiteboard where managers try to one-up each other with crazy ideas, pet projects, power blocks, and tons of other hair brained schemes that should never make it out of the building. That's okay though, a business needs free thought and to be able to try new things internally, along with come up with new ways of doing things. With guidance, the best ideas will rise to the top, and the company presents a unified plan that works for everybody.

With Microsoft, I can't help but think that some of these crazy ideas escaped from the board room, and the company hasn't lost its way a little bit. Games and consoles are still part toy, something Nintendo and Sony still get, and you need to trust your users and not make them worry about licensing and other restrictions when they pick up one of your system's games from the shelf. It's like making gamers worry about 24-chracter activation codes, holographic stickers of authenticity, and the other little things companies do that essentially say 'we don't trust you.'

Pivot now, and think about pen-and-paper RPGs. There are plenty of strange whiteboard craziness that escaped pen-and-paper meeting rooms in the last few years, the pullback of the OGL to GSL being one of them, the elimination of electronic rights from the SRD/OGL, the Pathfinder Basic Box not being licensed as a base product to expand upon, and a whole bunch of others. Put some trust in your users if you want them to play your games, aka the PS4.

As a creator of games, yes, you do want to worry about sustaining your product; but you also need to make your entire ecosystem friendly and open. The D&D 3.0 to 3.5 OGL was a remarkable achievement, but it did not go far enough. As pen-and-paper game creators, your #1 job is creating a healthy ecosystem where everybody can join in, be creative, and play. With games like Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, and the other OGL clones, you can even write and sell your works as a third party for those games - without the publisher's approval. You can even do that with Pathfinder (paper and PDF products only), provided you follow the SRD's restrictions.

In an open system, freedom is celebrated, and people that want to participate in the 'game economy' can do so without restriction. With video games this means we support rental services, used game sellers, swap meets, and even friends that want to trade games with each other. With roleplaying games, it means creating a great base system, and then opening it up for everyone to play, buy your stuff, make money from, and enjoy. The great success stories in technology have always been from open systems with wide support (Android, iOS applications, Windows/Mac applications, etc). Where are our great open systems in roleplaying games? What will the next great success story be?

DNDClassics and the OGR

Victory, of a sorts.

Wizards and DriveThrueRPG have launched a new PDF store, dndclassics.com. This doesn't look to be a one-time thing, as they will be having rolling releases every so often. Check the press release for more info. The prices are great, only $5 for a D&D rulebook, and there are sales, which shows an active effort to maintain and drive interest in the store. Wizards deserves kudos for supporting one of the largest PDF distributors, DriveThruRPG, that is great to see them working with the third-party community, and noted and appreciated.

Overall, very nice, and thank you again Wizards for supporting players in the iPad and Android era. This is long overdue, and wonderful to see. I call out the good moves when I see them, and this is a great one, just like the re-release of the D&D 3.5 hardcovers. Hats off to you guys again for doing a great thing.

A couple issues come up because of this. Firstly, I hope D&D Next follows a similar release model with a PDF version being available on Day 0. I know Wizards needs to support its retailers, but that can always be done in other ways, like physical-only copies of modules, special box sets, and other deals. Give me a reason to drop by the game store and I will, but core rules products need to be available in PDF to strengthen the brand.

Another issue that I have read on various OGR forums is that old-school retro-clones are dead, such as Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord. With the release of the original rulebooks in PDF form, why play the retro-clones? Some are saying, the battle is won but the war is lost. I will agree with the elephant in the room, and say yes, the OGR is dead - at least how we knew it before.

These sort of things happen in the computer world all along, people flock to an alternative operating system because of some compatibility or workflow improvement, and then the big guys (Apple and Microsoft) copy it in their own way, and all of a sudden, everybody has this capability and there is no reason to stay with the old system. Same thing here, the original rules were out-of-print and locked away for the longest time, and the only way people could enjoy them were through the retro-clones. Now, Wizards releases the old material via PDF, and the reason to stick with the old systems is gone - right?

Not entirely. Remember, the old copies of D&D are still locked up behind a great copyright wall, third party producers still can't support 'old D&D' directly, say a module is compatible with it, or produce any material for it. If you support the OGL market, you have plenty of reasons to stick with Labyrinth Lord and other old-school clones. If Wizards starts tweaking licensing for the old books to support third-party publishers, things will really start to get interesting.

Let's call the new OGR the OGR2.0, and eliminate any notion of playing this because the old games are not available. What are our strongest reasons to play? As noted, the freedom for third-party publishers to publish and express themselves is important, and one of the great things that came out of the D&D3.0 era. Our new OGR2.0 should absorb the best qualities of why people should support it, and stick to those fundamental rights of game players. We may come to a time where the SRD and OGL is moved aside for more free and configurable licensing system such as the Creative Commons, and the electronic rights to play these games is protected and encouraged by third party developers. We live in the digital, portable world nowadays - what sense it it to play games that have such onerous electronic licensing restrictions?

In a way, D&D Classics is a great thing to happen, because it will force everybody to 'up their game.' Being the only source of old-school gaming isn't good enough anymore, quality has to improve, communicating 'the message' has to improve, and the core concept of freedom and third-party support needs to be spoken loud and clear. While I love the old games, in a way, they are not good enough to support the 'evergreen ecosystem' we desire in the digital age.

A revolution does need to happen, and while I love my copies of D&D, and Wizards, please get around to releasing Top Secret, Gangbusters, Star Frontiers and the other greats - the OGR needs to retool, rebuild, and recreate games built around freedom, quality, and openness. It is possible a new open-source 'operating system' needs to be created, and released for third party teams to support, sort of like 'The Android OS of Roleplaying'. While Android can be put of some crap hardware, it can be put on the best hardware as well, and it continues to grow daily.

The challenge both Wizards and the OGR community needs to think about is the 'Android problem,' and how to get revenue off a system such as that. You need an open-source gaming system, with hooks back home. Google does it electronically, by linking the OS to its search and advertising revenues. It could be as easy as making the D&D Next license free and open to use, but requiring every player to go through a free-to-use portal for rules downloads, character sheets, games, and the like. Free-to-play and freemium is the model to support, so subscription fees need to go away. The 'next RPG' should be as easy to play as creating an account, using the online character creator, picking a rules module, bringing up one of your character sheets, and playing. Once they are in the door, then charge for expansions and options.

You see, a fundamental shift is happening, a change in the market, and the new RPG market is waiting out there to be captured and owned. We are in a time of change, the old OGR needs to change, and someone needs to step up and own this opportunity. The new way of playing RPGs is out there and carried around in people's pockets and backpacks every day, and while PDFs address one piece of the puzzle, who is going to fill in the rest with that 'new way to play?'