Pen-and-Paper Videogaming

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

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

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

Still, there was a difference.

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

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

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

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

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

The CR System Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pen-and-Paper as Videogames

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

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

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

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

Less is More is Fun

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

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

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

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

Know Your Game

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

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

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

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.