Will D&D Ever be Anything More?

Whoa, what? Yeah, big question time. George and I were sitting there over coffee, and the thought came up, 'what is D&D?' Well, if you look at the what makes the game the game, D&D looks like this:

• Iconic Monsters (drow, mind flayers, beholders, orcs, goblins, etc)
• Classic Spells (sleep, fireball, magic missile)
• Traditional Classes (thief, wizard, fighter, cleric, etc)
• Mathematical Magic Items (+1 sword, +2 chain, +3 shield, etc)
• Wondrous Magic Items (elven boots, gauntlets of ogre power, bag of holding, etc)
• The rules (polyhedral dice, classes, levels, hp, AC, etc)

Now, some of these are taken from public-domain fantasy, others cribbed from copyrighted sources with the names changed, and still others are WoTC copyrighted material. If you can't find it in the old 3.x SRD, chances are it's "product identity" and copyrighted by someone, likely WoTC. All these items, spells, monsters, and the way things work are "D&D", and D&D does D&D well. For the most part. Depends on the edition, and what you think D&D is, of course.

Some people may say Pathfinder or Labyrinth Lord looks more like D&D to them, yet others think World of Warcraft fits their idea of D&D, and more power to them. In these cases D&D becomes synonymous with 'fantasy gaming' and you get a butter/margarine replacement system going on. People that are immersed in World of Warcraft don't care that there are no drow or beholders in the game, there is plenty of other cool stuff to replace those iconic monsters and races.

So the central question comes up, will D&D be anything more? Well, a big part of this depends on why you are asking the question. If you are happy with whatever your idea of D&D is, great, the question does not need to be asked. It's like having a slightly older smartphone that still works great, and you feel no need to upgrade to the newest thing. To you, that old smartphone fits your definition of what a phone should be, and you are happy. Of course, the phone companies and manufacturers probably dislike you for not spending money and upgrading, but that is another question entirely.

If you aren't happy with any idea of what D&D is currently, then the question becomes important. If your shelf is sagging under Pathfinder books, your 4th Edition D&D books are under-supported and errata-ed up, and there isn't interesting in playing a retro-clone; the question probably doesn't even matter to you anymore. You can literally walk away, play a fantasy MMO, and find people to play with a lot easier and without the constant stream of books and rules systems you have to learn, support, and store. In the smartphone market, it's like saying 'I don't need a smartphone' and just going back to a cheaper flip phone, saving your money, and opting out of the ecosystem. again, not a place the phone industry wants you to be, but at least it is still a valid choice.

D&D ultimately depends on what the creators put into it, and how they can make the game seem compelling again. I say 'seem' because what D&D is probably won't change much from it's roots, and by all signs, the 4E experiment is over. D&D needs to overcome 'I've played with that stuff already' and make itself fresh and relevant again. From the current set of releases, rehashing the old modules and patching them to play with D&D Next, I feel it's a lot like emulating classic C64 and Atari 2600 games, and expecting them to set the world on fire. It's great that the old stuff is available again, but it doesn't answer the question of 'why this is relevant?' In a world looking for the next World of Warcraft, why is Atari 2600 Asteroids cool again, other than for nostalgia?

Yeah, a big question today, but one worth asking if you love the game. The game, in its heart, is all the cool stuff that lives and breathes in the D&D universe. Less so the rules, as 4E proved, although somewhat messily. Bringing the cool stuff together is way more important than rules, and creating that shared experience is what I am a fan of. To make D&D something more, it has to breathe again and live. World of Warcraft should not be good enough to replace the core experience of D&D. How will that play out with D&D Next? I have no idea, honestly.

Is the question important to me? Honestly, yes, but there is a big but in there. I can get my D&D-like hit from other games and rules systems; and the stuff you can't replace, the D&D iconic things, aren't as important to my gaming life as much as they used to be. Pathfinder proved you can be D&D without most of the D&D iconic things. The challenge for WoTC is make these things unique to the core D&D experience mean something again.

All this comes up as I sit her looking at my old smartphone, wondering if it's worth upgrading it, or falling back to an old one. Good enough, do I need a new one, or fall back? Which choice enriches my life the most? The question is half my choice, and half of what the smartphone companies can offer me. If nothing new can be offered, staying put is a valid and wise choice. Flashy ads don't cut it, either, a new phone has to bring something new and exciting to the table - just like a new roleplaying game.

Distaster Control: Sanity Wins, But Then What?

Well, Microsoft pulled back their crazy whiteboard idea of limiting XBox1 game resales, sharing games, and even the always-on Internet connectivity thing. Expect the Kinect 2.0 requirement to fall soon as the retreat continues. Once a company starts pulling back, it usually pulls back a great deal. You know I couldn't stay quiet about this, since it plays into my theory of 'stupid whiteboard decisions' that should not have escaped into the wild. It happens to every company, including some I am familiar with.

Did I say familiar with? Oh yes, I have been here too. After the pullback, when everyone is picking up the pieces from a disastrous series of decisions, and everyone is trying to make things right again. Trust me, there are a lot of people in Microsoft right now wondering what the hell just happened, worried about the future, and looking to make things right. We have to let those forces win, the gamers, QA people, engineers, and others who probably wanted no part of those crazy decisions, who are still excited about the XBox1, and want to make things good again. Am I actually pulling for them? Is this a ray of hope?

Not totally. The decision getting out of the building is troubling, and it does signal troubled waters in the whole effort. This was a bad decision, and yes, this is why people get thrown under the bus. Rightfully so too, because the public needs to be told 'things are under control' and 'this is where things went wrong.' Oh yes, we need more here, a public admission of why this happened, and why it will not happen again. Bad things happen to good companies all the time, but the great ones are transparent, and let their customers know 'we screwed up' and how they are going to put in a permanent fix for it.

I am looking for this shoe to drop from Microsoft, this will signal a change, and frankly I have been waiting for it to drop with some pen-and-paper companies. D&D Next's transparency and playtesting is a good thing, although it is going to take a while for me to put my trust in the D&D brand after the mess that was made of 4th Edition. Too many books, too much reliance on D&DI, a mess made with the errata, revising powers to the point where they broke character builds, and a lot more. I'd like to see some 'what we did wrong' articles from Wizards, I would find them fascinating; and also that goes towards the whole transparency thing that I love about great companies. It's also how I work, and who I like to work for.

The XBox1 could be an awesome system, and consumers are very forgiving - but, and this is a big BUT, Microsoft needs to be honest with us. Lay out why they made those decisions, why they thought they were cool, what they would have done for us - and then admit they were wrong, things weren't focus grouped, and opinions were ignored. We need to hear it all. This begins the healing process, and helps us forgive. BUT, and yeah, that was a big but, we need that admission and that openness for us NOW to be able to put our trust in them again. Lay it out, do it now, don't hide things, and let's get this behind us. The longer it goes on, the more people will think this is just another half-step to make things right.

Fixing a problem and not admitting you were wrong never truly fixes things.

The Hidden Costs of Computers and Pen-and-Paper Games

The best way I can describe this is buying a new computer. When you buy a computer, you aren't done paying for it. No, I am not talking financing it, but there are costs that continue to get charged to you in one way or the other. Even if you have a computer, you are still getting charged these costs. Now, I am defining 'cost' here broadly, it is not only money, but it is time. Now intrinsically, both are the same, as all money is is a way 'labor' can be stored and monetized but that is beside the point.

Your new computer has the following costs in real money:

• The cost of the computer itself
• The cost of keeping it 'fed' in software, paid-updates, and games (Steam)
• Ongoing access fees for Internet and digital media (Netflix, iTunes)
• The cost of keeping it upgraded in hardware with monitors, mice, and accessories
• The cost of storage media, cloud storage, or backups
• The cost (in space) of system setup
• Repair costs to replace or fix hardware

Okay, a pretty agreeable list for everyone. These are pretty basic tasks that you agree to pay out of your pocket, so they are up-front and most are optional. Let's look at the hidden costs of computers, and I will measure these in time:

• The time needed to learn the system (for new OS's and programs)
• The time needed to update the OS
• The time needed to keep on top of system security and antivirus updates
• The time needed to research and work around program incompatibilities and limitations
• The time needed to keep up and maintain the file formats you use
• The time needed to update ALL programs on the machine
• The time needed to update ALL hardware drivers on the machine
• The time spent in researching and finding software packages for your operating system
• The time spent in inefficient basic tasks (file and disk management, backups, writing media)
• The time spent in configuration (hardware, icons, desktops, tiles, wallpapers, screensavers)

Let me start off by saying your time is usually more valuable than your money. Let me say then that nobody is paying you for the time spent in the above list. You can have the best computer in the world, but if you are spending more time fiddling with it, learning it, and updating it - it is eating more of your time than it is worth. The only time spent on a computer that is earning you value is when you are either being productive or playing a game - the things you bought the machine for in the first place. Everything else is a cost to you.

Now where are we going with this, and why is it important for a gaming blog? Let's shift gears, and figure out the costs a pen-and-paper game have in real money:

• The cost of the game books needed to play
• The cost of expansion books and the time needed to learn them
• The costs of keeping it 'fed' in modules and gaming materials
• The ongoing access fees of costs of character creation software (Hero Lab, D&D Insider)
• The costs of dice, pens, paper, and other table materials
• The costs of figures, battle maps, and tabletop terrain
• The costs to replace damaged or lost books

Again, a pretty standard list, some are needed and most are optional. Now the real point of this article comes up, and this is a pretty sorry metric for most every pen-and-paper game, becuase most of them do horribly in this regard. What are the costs in time for pen-and-paper games. Note that I am purposefully excluding play time - that is the 'value earn' time that you bought the game for. This list is strictly the 'junk time' wasted in supporting a roleplaying game system:

• The time to learn the game and read the books
• The time to teach it to every new player
• The time needed to explain and introduce game worlds and back story
• The time to adjudicate and decide unclear rules and situations during play
• The time needed to keep up with official rules errata for the game
• The time needed to teach errata to every player in the game
• The time spent in non-play tasks like character creation
• The time spent maintaining characters in level ups, power choice, gear choice, and character improvement
• The time spent getting play groups together and finding new players

I know some people enjoy some of these parts, but we are using the measure of 'play time is gold.' Now many games purposefully increase these time costs as a part of a system lock-in strategy. With computers, you normally want to reduce the time costs - increasing them is a hassle and makes the computer not worth owning. For pen-and-paper games, if a rules system is ultra-complex and all-encompassing, you literally don't have the time or the energy to learn or play anything else. You always can, of course, but some systems enshrine complexity to the degree where you have to make a mental commitment to play only that, and nothing else - especially if your friends have invested as much time as you have, or even more. Pathfinder and D&D 3E and 4E follow this model, and do quite well at it.

Part of the problem is that it is easy to walk away from a simple game - you have little invested in it. This time and money investment is a huge part of marketing games such as Warhammer and 40K, the buy-in costs to buy, assemble, paint, and create armies is very high - and thus the lock in for players is as well. Same thing with pen-and-paper games. If you own a shelf full of gaming books of a system, you are locked in, both with a money cost and a time cost.

Is the time-wasting tactic used for system lock-in bad? Well, for computers, it is. Part of what makes Windows such a giant is that you have to spend so much time with it to keep it running. Owning that computer takes so much mental effort worrying about it, it almost creates a parental dependency between user and machine. The computer is helpless without your attention, and this creates a sort of system lock-in as well between you and your computer. You want to play the latest games and get work done, so you accept the time costs involved with that. If there were computers out there where you could do the same things, but for less time and hassle - would you walk away?

People are walking away from this model today, and thus Windows as well. Tablets and iPads are replacing the web browsing and email needs for many desktop owners that don't need all that power. Android is a more open ecosystem with greater freedom and less hardware support time requirements. Chromebooks are 'zero time cost' computers that just open up and work, without worrying about driver updates, system security, file formats, or software functionality. Of course, in a Chromebook, your files are locked-in to Google's ecosystem, but they allow you to use other storage providers (Dropbox, etc) as well, so there is still freedom to store files where you wish, provided you want to spend the time doing so.

Are people walking away from complicated pen-and-paper games? Well, World of Warcraft decimated D&D like Magic the Gathering decimated, well, D&D (a long time ago when Magic first came out, and it was easy and fast to get into and play). MMOs give players a higher 'value add' time than a pen-and-paper game, you can log in and immediately start having fun. You don't have to spend hours maintaining your characters in separate computer programs, learning volumes of rulebooks, or finding other players to play with you. All of that is just there. In fact, MMOs that purposefully reduce costs in the time needed to learn, and also the costs needed to play (free to play) often do better than ones requiring a huge time or money investment up front.

What does that say for complicated pen-and-paper games that are getting more expensive in both the cost of books needed to play, and the time needed to support them? Is the pen-and-paper gaming industry going in the wrong direction with more expensive games, especially in this free-to-play world? Just because dinosaurs leave large tracks doesn't mean you should follow them.

The next big thing in pen-and-paper games will follow the free-to-play model. Simple rules, optional upgrades, minimal upkeep time, and zero-entry cost. None of what I see in D&D Next, Pathfinder, Star Wars, or any other upcoming release fits that model. In fact, the system lock-in of the older games, Pathfinder, D&D4, D&D3, actually keep people from wanting to learn the next big complicated thing that comes out. The giant dinosaurs fell to the smaller and faster ones that could adapt and move quicker, they weren't replaced by even larger dinosaurs that ate more resources.

It is one of those game-design issues I ponder about on a lazy day, looking at shelves of games beckoning to be played, but taking so much time the activity seems like a waste...of time. Are we going in the wrong direction? Where is the next big thing? Will it even look like those games on the shelf next to me?

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?'