The Challenge of ...Challenge Rating

Do CR and balanced encounters hurt 5E? Is the game better played without taking encounter balance into account, and just running "the world as it is"? This topic sort of sucks to cover, since I need to go back to the rulebooks and check exactly what they say to be fair and ensure the game's intent is upheld.

Creating a Combat Encounter

When creating a combat encounter, let your imagination run wild and build something your players will enjoy. Once you have the details figured out, use this section to adjust the difficulty of the encounter.

D&D 2014, Dungeon Master's Guide, pg 81

To me, "use this section to adjust the difficulty" sounds like a subtle nudge towards a requirement to balance encounters. I don't have the 2024 books because I don't want to spend money on them, nor do I have space for books I won't use. Also, 2014 is the more popular version of the game, so that is what I go by.

So, for 2014 D&D, it is "let your imagination run wild" and then "use this section."

There seems to be this huge assumption that we must balance encounters. I suppose the weight of thousands of "how do I balance 5E encounters" videos on YouTube has made the entire subject something we no longer question. What is more confusing is that most say it is just a tool, and many books say it isn't even a sure thing.

BUILDING COMBAT ENCOUNTERS

If you are running a pre-written adventure, combat encounters have likely already been designed for you— with groups of enemies already put together in a way appropriate for the level of the adventure and the events of the story. However, when creating your own adventures or spicing up published material, you may need to create your own combat encounters.

Tales of the Valiant, Monster Vault, Page 7

In ToV? There seems to be a requirement to balance encounters, right in the first pages of the Monster Vault. On page 8, they give three examples of how to create encounters: story-based,  lore-based, and encounter-type. The first two seem like you are not using the tables in the chapter, while the last one strongly implies it. ToV does seem to feel like encounter building is a requirement for running a game, since the section is huge, detailed, and full of advice on building encounters.

In TOV, it is, "When creating your own adventures, you may need to create your own combat encounters." There is a tonal difference here, almost sounding like "Just buy published adventures from Kobold Press." The tools are very detailed, better than D&D 2014, and they feel like a more complete system.

A note here: at least there is recognition that "story-based" encounters are in the game, and this will be expanded upon in the next version of 5E we take a look at. Story-based encounters are unbalanced, "it is what it is" encounters with monsters and wandering monsters, and these are NOT rated on CR, nor are they balanced against a daily budget.

Oddly, these are called "story-based" since that implies the story was prewritten. In most of these cases, they are either wandering monsters or "monsters that are just there," and not part of the traditional, pre-written, balanced, story-style adventures.

Combat Encounters

There are two main ways to build a combat scene: 

Challenge-Based Encounter. The Narrator may set out to prepare a fun, challenging combat encounter and choose opponents accordingly. A set-piece battle in an important dungeon room or the climactic battle in a story arc are often built to challenge the adventurers. 

Story-Based Encounter. Often, the story and player actions determine the nature of a conflict. If adventurers antagonize the city watch they may have to fight guards, and if they anger an archmage they may be forced to battle the archmage. There’s no guarantee that a fight is winnable: the party must deal with the consequences of their choices.

In either case, the Narrator will want to know whether a fight is likely to be trivial, unwinnable, or somewhere in between. In a challenge-based encounter, the Narrator wants to aim for a middle ground of difficulty. In a story-based encounter, the Narrator may want to signal to the adventurers when they’re about to bite off more than they can chew. It’s rarely fun when a crushing defeat or an easy victory is a surprise to everyone (including the Narrator). 

Level Up: Advanced 5E, Trials & Treasures, page 40

Level Up A5E does the best job of clarifying when you should use the CR system. If something is "challenge-based," you use the CR. If the encounter is "story-based," you do not use the CR system; it is what it is. This is more of an old-school interpretation, where a traditional "story-based" module was not written with CR in mind, the entire layout of the dungeon "was what it was," and the players went in there and did their own resource management and judged encounter difficulty themselves.

Walk into a room filled with 40 kobolds?

"The party must deal with the consequences of their actions."

This also implies you can play A5E completely like you would a BX game, throwing out CR, just keying a dungeon, and letting players wander around in there and figure out difficulty and how far they can go by themselves. This is the one thing that was so dangerous about the old Goodman Games 5E versions of the classic TSR adventures: they were presented as-is with 5E stats, and while the B1 recreation does go over encounter balance, the entire B2 adventure is presented as a faithful recreation of B2, and they will happily throw 40 kobolds in a room as a 5E encounter, in a first-level adventure, as an encounter first-level players could run into by the third room they enter.

By A5E's definitions, all of the GG TSR module recreations are "story-based encounters" and meant to be run as-is, without consulting a CR chart or trying to balance anything. That makes sense, and players need to think on their feet again, manage resources, and judge challenges instead of the referee doing it for them.

Ever since Wizards took over D&D, they have been obsessed with balancing encounters and forcing the referee to be the final say. You need to buy the next adventure if you found that too challenging. In previous versions, there was very little balance other than "the monsters in this adventure are suitable for this level range." When we ran the game, we guessed, and most of the time it worked out fine. We knew how things went after a few dozen sessions, and balanced things on the fly.

The overemphasis on encounter balance makes the game harder to referee, for some, trying to perfect and obsess about an imperfect tool, which is only a ballpark estimate with a huge margin of error.

The "party balances content" also applies to all the 5E recreations of the Labyrinth Lord modules, such as Barrowmaze. These all exist in this strange alternate universe where nobody playing 5E used the CR ratings, balanced encounters, or spent all this time worrying about a system that was only made to be a "suggestion" for how to balance encounters, that somehow became rules-as-written, and the only way to create an encounter, or your players will revolt and call you a terrible dungeon master.

Encounter balance is probably one of the things most misunderstood between modern 5E players, "playing by the rules," and the old-school crowd, "calling them as they see them." You will see endless YouTube videos on how to balance encounters, and OSR players sit there wondering why any of this is needed.

Back in the day, it was the players who "balanced encounters" by getting out of there when things seemed too dire, and the resources were nearly all gone. We prayed we would not encounter a wandering monster on the way out or on the way back to town. The referee balanced nothing.

Palladium System: Two Attacks for Living?

Palladium Fantasy Gamemaster's Pack, page 50

So I was looking through the pregenerated characters in the Palladium Fantasy Gamemaster's Pack, and I saw a 4th-level ranger with ...five melee attacks? And a rate of fire of five with his longbow?

Then a sense of panic hit me. Five? Five! Where are they getting five?!

Am I getting all the attacks I should be getting?

This is critical in any Palladium game, and this is one thing D&D 3.0 stole from the system: the notion of your attacks per turn going up, and your damage naturally increasing as you level. Granted, in Palladium, attacks can be traded for defense, so there is a balance to the mechanic, where in D&D 3.x, they are just attacks. Wizards did a lousy job at implementing the concept they borrowed, again.

So, where do these attacks come from? Let's look at Palladium Fantasy.

The first two are easy: Hand-to-Hand Combat Expert starts with two attacks per round.

The next one is also easy. Since this character is 4th level, we look up the chart, record the bonuses, and see that at 4th level we get "one additional attack per melee round."

That is three of the five accounted for. Where do these two other attacks come from? We have an explanation on the forums:

https://palladiumbooks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=170392

Later revisions of the rules and game introduced the rule "2 attacks for living," which means that without any melee combat skills, you get two attacks, and these will stack on top of the HTH combat styles in the game. This was present even in some of the older books in the Palladium fantasy line, especially in NPCs and pregenerated characters.

The Palladium Fantasy RPG book needs updating, as do many of the other books in the line.

So this is our five melee attacks, and where they come from:

• 2 attacks for living
• +2 attacks for HTH Expert
• +1 Attack for HTH Expert at level 4

For ranged, this is where they come from:

• 2 attacks for WP Archery
• +2 attacks for archery RoF
• +1 at level 2
• +1 at level 4
• +1 attack for HTH Expert at level 4

That HTH Expert extra attack at level 4 DOES apply to missile weapon fire! This may seem surprising, but multiple sources confirm it, and it aligns with the pregens.

And I have sources on the Palladium forums:

https://palladiumbooks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=79257#:~:text=Do%20the%20attacks%20from%20HTH,a%20bonus%20to%20ranged%20combat.&text=Question:Within%20the%20new%20rules,tiny%20+2%20bonus%20from%20aiming?

This is a question that Google's AI gave me both answers for; it insisted the wrong answer was correct, said I was dead wrong, and after I found the official clarifications, it went back on its original answer and admitted I was right. AI can be dead wrong and insist it is 100% right, trying to provide facts and proof, when it is clearly NOT.

AI is a very persuasive liar when it is dead wrong.

This is why we need a human soul in any decision-making process.

And why we need skeptics and those who challenge us.

Be very, very, very careful and never trust AI! It is a known liar in some cases, will lie to prove itself correct, and bases its claims on incorrect sources, trying to use this as justification for the truth. Good luck playing with an AI DM, everybody over there in D&D land. Your character will die because the AI DM goes stupid on you and tries to use someone's incorrect rule interpretation on some forum somewhere as the official rule.

Also, they put a lot of work into making these AI systems sound super confident, which also helps sell the lie and justifies the billions of dollars they are pouring into it all.

In Rifts Ultimate Edition, which is the master rules update for all Palladium games from 2017 onward, the HTH tables were updated to the correct "4 attacks per melee round" value, and the unwritten "2 attacks for living" rule was done away with.

Also, the language for the level 4 bonus in HTH Combat Expert was changed in Rifts Ultimate. In Palladium Fantasy, it is:

• Level 4: One additional attack per melee.

In Rifts Ultimate, it is:

• Level 4: +1 additional attack/action per melee round.

This makes it clear that it is an "attack/action" per melee round, which DOES include missile weapon fire. Missile weapons fire as many times as the character has melee attacks, but some skills do have their own rate of fire rules that these HTH attack bonuses do modify.

So, by Rifts Ultimate, our melee attacks are:

• 4 attacks for HTH Expert
• +1 Attack for HTH Expert at level 4

And for our ranged attacks, by Rifts Ultimate, this is unchanged:

• 2 attacks for WP Archery
• +2 attacks for archery RoF
• +1 at level 2
• +1 at level 4
• +1 attack for HTH Expert at level 4

As far as I am concerned, Rifts Ultimate is the master Palladium rules update, and it should be used with all Palladium games, including Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas & Superspies, Palladium Fantasy, and every other game.

Kobold Press: Book of Hexcrawl 1

But Tales of the Valiant (and 5E) needs better exploration rules!

Um, incorrect. More and more, Tales of the Valiant is living up to the original dream of 5E being a "modular rule system" where you could plug in different rule modules and have a game that plays according to your preferences and tastes.

And the game is being built now. This was the genius behind ToV's "not doing anything new" with the rules; they needed a "basic set" to build upon. The game got roundly trashed for being "just a 5E clone," but we never saw the plans for this game, nor could we see how this was shaping up as a modular rules framework.

All that "extra stuff" we wanted them to do?

We are starting to see it now.

The Kobold Press store has an excellent series of "Book of Hex Crawl" games that create a more in-depth hex-crawl system than I have seen in many old-school games. It even includes a "food and water" chart that links to the fatigue system modeled after the original Outdoor Survival game, which inspired the 1974 D&D's overland rules.

These rules include structuring a hex-crawl game, encounters, weather, mapping, landmarks, factions, and every other part you could dream about having in a hex-crawl game. ToV supplies the rules framework, and this supplies the model of play.

Oh. So, ToV has excellent hex-crawl rules. I hope these get compiled into a hardcover someday.

The only other part of the equation here to having a "completely fixed 5E" is in-play options, such as making the game more deadly and old-school. I am sure the upcoming GM's guide will have rules for this, and you could always pull in rules from 5E Hardmode, or even the equally excellent 5E Hardcore Mode rules.

Both books make for a great, old-school feeling game with all the classes and rules you are familiar with. You can choose rules to customize your experience, all while using the core ToV books as the rules engine under the hood.

There is this sentiment that "5E is too easy, " which isn't true. D&D 2014 and 2024, played as-is, have this problem. Level Up A5E is better. ToV isn't as severely affected due to balance and monster fixes. ToV can be fixed quite easily, and is a much better base game due to its simplicity and streamlined nature. But I get it, a lot of people are trying to dump on 5E and make you feel powerless playing it.

But I would not use the above books with D&D. I have walked away from that game, and they do their own thing. What they did during the OGL disaster tells me they don't want open frameworks or communities. The Creative Commons was a good step, but we still need a leadership change and more openness from them, especially with legacy rulesets that people still enjoy. They have a long way to go.

With ToV, my investments in my 5E books are protected and forward-looking with new content.

Would I play a ToV "old school" game using the Book of Hexcrawl and the 5E Hardcore Mode books? You bet I would! I play my games "my way" and I am not beholden to a book.

ToV gives you the base for a modular framework without all the pressure of D&D Beyond to "conform to the rules as written so you can find a game." This is where you lack power, on online systems that force you to conform to one way of playing. This is where the peer pressure is. You are paying a monthly fee to get marketed to and pressured by others to conform.

The dream of Open 5E is still alive. This is a modular, pick-and-choose, mix-and-match, play-it-your-way world where your old 5E books aren't worthless. And you can play 5E "just like old-school games" if you want.

Don't let peer pressure push you back into that relationship with Wall Street. This is the first step in heading down the wrong path, leading you into a relationship where you are pressured to buy things, log in daily, and conform to a crowd of people who don't care about anything else than keeping people in the herd to protect their worthless digital "investments."

You can mix and match and do your own thing outside of that world.

It is a better place.

Cypher System: The Universal Task Mechanic

There are a lot of incredible rules in the Cypher System, but none more universal than how monsters are created.

You set the level.

You multiply the level by 3 for hits.

That is the average monster of anything in the game. Now, you can tweak the numbers so everything isn't so uniform, like making a goblin a level 2 creature with 6 hits but making the little guy vicious and force level 3 defense rolls (doing 3 damage) on the characters - now the goblin is weak to taking damage but can put out more damage than an average level 2 critter. Monsters can have many other special abilities and rules, including special attacks and defenses and anything else you could find in a d20 game.

Minus a heck of a lot of rules.

However, what if you wanted to rate a complicated, multipart task where progress is tracked?

Simply make it a monster.

Set the task level, and multiply by 3 to calculate the "hits" of the task. Make rolls against the task as usual, like standard combat. But how much "damage" do you do on a successful roll? That depends on the effort, and you can rate that as a light (2 points, eases), medium (4 points), or heavy weapon (6 points, inability). The player chooses the level of effort (2, 4, or 6) and modifies difficulty according to the situation, assets, skills, and rolls.

Reduce the task's hits (or total effort needed) on a success. On a failure, no effort is gained. On failed rolls, you could reduce a character's ability score pool by the task level if the task is physically or mentally exerting. You could even use that as damage (such as untangling a panicked animal from a thorny briar).

Bonus effects on the rolls (like bonus damage) can be used to reduce the task's hits/total effort.

The atomic pass/fail rolls are still the standard way of doing most everything in the game. Still, this system lets you use the combat mechanics for complex tasks, such as safecracking, where a series of rolls may be needed to open the safe, and the character could mentally exert themselves on a string of failures.

The rules of this game are so easy to hack, and this is one of the best d20 systems out there.

Sci-Fi Gaming: Ship Combat

Sci-fi gaming and starship combat is a tricky thing. You don't want this to be a gimme and have the players win every starship fight, but the nature of space battles are typically all-or-nothing life-or-death affairs. You lose, your engines are slag and you are drifting off in space, you outright blow up into space vapors, life support is gone, a laser vaporizes the bridge and just the ship's doctor is left hiding in an airlock, and you the party is in a "might as well be dead" sort of place.

Games with starfighter combat are similarly fraught with insta-death WW2 movie style danger, unless, of course, there is some sort of built-in player protection with the rules. I don't like player protection in my rules, as I am a fan of the old-school "keep characters simple and disposable" mentality. Player protection opens the door to complicated character creation and is ultimately a tool of retaining players via a social contract built into the rules.

If it takes four hours to create a character I am not having them die in the first five minutes!

Why would players play that type of game? I wouldn't. I would play the game that takes 5 minutes to design a character and 5 minutes to lose them. I don't have that much time anymore, and frankly all of the games that supported complex designs and player protection have been put away. My life is simple, and my games need to reflect that or I end up looking at them and never enjoying them. They become "things I wish I had the time to play" and they make me feel sad. So away they go.

Ship Combat as Rules Complexity

It is funny because I started this article thinking about sci-fi RPG ship combat and it ended up really being about how easy it is to lose characters. The two concepts are tightly tied together because if you cannot lose characters easy your ship combat systems must reflect that and have player-protection rules written into them as well. Complexity is added to the system, and the amount of special cases and rules you need to process increase.

In computer terms, your application becomes bloated and full of special cases. Your CPU, memory, and disk space usage get higher and higher the more you write these special case rules, and the whole system gets and feels heavy and slow.

And if players are protected, ships must be as well. I am not spending four hours designing a starship to have it blown up in the first five minutes! Bloat increases and the time it takes to process and play the game increases.

Part of what made us give up on Pathfinder is that you could not keep the entire game in your head anymore. Even remembering "what book do I go to for that?" became a nightmare and we found ourselves shelving books on different shelves based on what type of rules the book had. We never really got into Starfinder as a result, which is a shame because it looked fun, but our overload with Pathfinder contributed (unfairly I would say) to our exhaustion with the system or anything like it.

Knight Hawks

The old Star Frontiers supplement Knight Hawks felt like a good balance of ship combat, complexity, and character interaction. It felt strange for us at the time to "wargame it out" while the PCs were there, as we preferred more of a storytelling game. Also, our ideas of starships were a bit more advanced than the lower-tech designs seen in Star Frontiers (because they never had ships in the main rules and we assumed Star Wars and Space Opera were more our thing for how ships worked).

There wasn't a lot of player protection either in Knight Hawks, other than bailing out and running to the escape pods. If your ship was space toast, that was it. I had as player who refused to put escape pods in his ship, and that upped the ante. His reasoning was, "if the ship goes, I go" and it was a sort of a silly thing kids do, but it raised the stakes.

I know, the ship should have failed its first inspection as a deathtrap and worker safety hazard, but we never knew better. And I am not sure anyone would want to work on that thing looking back, but he was "the best starship captain in the galaxy" and took on that sort of "Han Solo never used escape pods" sort of machismo.

These days, give me an escape pod please.

Traveller

I see escape pods mentioned in the new Traveller rules (under encounters), but not in the ship designs or rules in what I can quickly find. They are one of those "assumed items" I suppose but I would like that spelled out somewhere (I may have missed it), and I would like those clearly laid out on the ship maps (since that really matters during boarding actions or other emergencies).

I need to play some more of this game, especially ship combat, and get a feel for how this goes. You can sit and theory craft about "how you think things are" but until you play your opinions are just theories and feelings. Knight Hawks and even Space Opera we played a lot of, and we had a good feel for how those games worked. More on this soon.

Star Wars

There are a lot of different Star Wars games, and our experiences with the Fantasy Flight version did not include many starship battles. Now that I think about it, not having any starship battles in a Star Wars RPG just feels...wrong. The modules we played did not have many or you could skip them, which we did. From what we saw, they were more abstracted and narrative affairs, and the ships felt more like abstract characters that fought each other using player skills instead of traditional vehicles where it is more of a "to the metal" experience of damage location charts and complicated movement and positioning systems.

If I pull my old Star Wars books out I may play this, but it is a more complicated game and my interest in things Star Wars is pretty low right now. The story of that universe feels nearly done for some reason to me. I am ready to move on and see new things.

Overall

Overall I need more experience in Traveller at this point, and I want to see how that system has been updated. I like the lower-tech ship battles and more gritty feel, and that is what captures my imagination these days. I am not feeling much interest in flashy space battles and I am a bit worn-out on modern CGI and VFX. I am craving the real these days, and something cold and mathematical like the old Harpoon rules from GDW. A system where you could go into a battle knowing you are going to lose it, and only your wits and possibly sheer luck can save you. These days, that is what excites me about ship combat.

M2E Traveller: Specialty Skills

First off, I am going to call Mongoose's second Traveller edition M2E Traveller just to keep it short and let people know what I am talking about. There are a lot of great editions, but from what I see M2E Traveller is the most D&D 5th Edition version of Traveller out there and I like the streamlined and simplified focus of this version of the game very much.

I still have a good collection of M1E Traveller books, and those can for the most part be used with little modification as I hear. I am happy with this purchase and look forward to diving in deeper.

Specialty Skills

I was so confused about these and how you gained skill levels, and then I watched a couple Youtube videos and all was explained.

When you get a level zero skill in a skill with specialties, set all specialty levels of that skill to zero. If you get a skill level in that skill, increase one of the specialties. If you get the semi-rare "Skill 1" choice where you set the skill level to 1, or if you have it at 1 nothing happens in a specialty skill - set one of the specialty skill levels to 1 (or if they are all 1 or higher, nothing happens).

In short, specialty skills branch out one skill into several areas and are all raised separately. Setting them all to zero when you first get a level zero skill is the special case; otherwise, raise them separately and independently as your character gains skills in character creation.

Tunnels and Trolls Deluxe: Missile Weapons

From the Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls Rulebook, page 78:

If the character aims for a particular target and makes the (to-hit) saving roll, then that damage will automatically take effect against the target when damage is assessed at the end of that combat round (even if the party loses the round). 

If your character misses the saving roll to hit, you still count the weapon damage toward the party’s overall HPT regardless of whether the PC party wins or loses overall.

Okay, so let's say my archer had +6 personal adds, and is using a 4d6 damage standard bow. I am fighting a MR 16 gremlin who rolls 2d6+8.

In a "party" of one. This applies to a party of two as well, but I am using a one-person "party" to highlight this rule.

So if I miss, my 4d6+6 attack is still counted in the my party's turn damage total (HPT)? Also, the word "still" implies if you hit, the damage applies to HPT on a successful to-hit.

Which means the damage applies, even on a failed to-hit SR.

Again, I use a one-person party to highlight the contradiction, but for two people this is an equally valid point because 4d6+6 is a lot of HPT contribution for a pair of adventurers.

Chaos Equals HPT?

There feels like a disconnect here for a rule intended for a 4-6 person party where the archer's contributions feel like they should be accounted for in the chaos of a large battle, hit or miss. With smaller parties or single archers, this rule feels like it short-circuits the missile weapons to-hit system. For solo adventures with a single archer (or even two people), this matters a lot.

Let's say in my fight with the gremlin that he rolls 3 + 1 + 8 = 12 and I roll 5 + 6 + 6 + 5 + 6 = 28 and I miss the to-hit SR. I beat him by 28 - 12 = 16 and the MR 16 gremlin dies, even though I missed? That can't just happen from the chaos of combat unless the little bugger got confused and ran off a cliff.

The Original 7/7.5 Rules

This is one place where I can say I am confused a little on this rule (and would love a clarification), and our group will likely be house-ruling this back to the 7/7.5 version where the following is said on page 97 of the rulebook:

Make a DEX SR (or perhaps a similar roll using your “Marksmanship” Talent or the like) to see if the missile hit. If you miss the SR, you get no points toward the melee total. If you make it, your points count no matter what.

Note there is no "single target damage" rule mentioned in 7/7.5 where missile damage (in combat against an active foe) goes straight to MR/CON and is reduced by armor, as it seems all missile damage goes straight to a side's HPT. In Deluxe, this rule is re-introduced as a benefit of making the to-hit SR (and aiming at a particular target), and it also means a successful hit also adds to the side's HPT (and is handled as a unique missile hit during step #9, not counting double because total melee damage is counted separately from missile and magic damage).

This is a key difference between the versions, in 7.5 the game is more focused on the HPT and not individual attacks. In 5.5 missile weapons are separate attacks apart from the HPT. In 8.0/Deluxe they try to go back to the 5.5 "single attack" feeling, but still want to keep the "missile weapons add to HPT" rule of 7.5, and I feel the game ends up a bit confused in this regard.

Consequences

There always is a consequence for a house-rule, isn't there? With the deluxe rules, I make my to-hit SR and roll damage. The gremlin rolls melee damage. These are compared. If I make my to-hit, magic and missile damage is applied first, and the gremlin dies as this is ruled as a "single target" hit - damage goes straight to MR and armor reduces.

In Deluxe, if I do not make my to-hit and miss, we go into HPT vs. HPT mode in step #10 (page 86). My total is higher anyways, and the gremlin jumps in front of the arrow and dies.

With the 7/7.5 rule, missiles must make the to-hit roll to contribute towards HPT. If I miss, the gremlin takes no damage, I take 2d6+8, and we go on to the next round of combat. If I hit, this goes into HPT versus HPT mode (with no single-target hit rule), and with my original rolls above, the gremlin dies.

Final Thoughts: 7/7.5 is Very Clear and Playable

I like the 7/7.5 missile weapon rules enough to house-rule these in as my preferred way of handling missile combat, over the structured and more-complex rules in Deluxe. Also, the single-target rule's reintroduction in 8.0 seems to have made the entire combat sequence less clear to me, and is apt to confuse players at my table. We like the 7.5 rules:

If you hit, you hit, and the missile damage goes towards the party's damage total.

If you miss, it doesn't.

There is no splitting magic, missile, and melee damage afterwards with single-target rules - all damage done (melee, missile, and magic) by one side adds to total party damage counted in the turn.

Simple.

The only drawback is you lose the "single-target damage" deadly (and almost simulation-like) effect with an archer supporting a melee, but then again, if I shoot an unaware monster it should go straight to MR anyways, so that effect is still in the game. Still, in melee, I can see adding to HPT and losing "single target damage" as a more realistic rule since the opposing HPT roll (reducing damage) simulates the monster "on defense" and trying to avoid getting shot. Out of melee when sniping, the "straight to MR" thing applies since there is no active defense, and the "single target" rule is not "lost" - it just doesn't apply in a melee with creatures aware of the archer.

Final-Final Thoughts: TrollBridge Thread

After I wrote this, I found this thread on the TrollBridge e-zine forum site:

http://trollbridge.proboards.com/thread/3352/missile-weapon-damage-deluxe

So yes, hit or miss, they add to HPT, and that seems to be the consensus there. It feels odd to disagree with the official ruling, but I can't wrap my head around "missing a shot" and still doing damage.

House Rule #1: Missile Weapons

On a successful to-hit SR, missile damage is added to the party's total. If the SR is missed, no points are added to the party's total. If the monster is unaware, out of combat, or defenseless, the damage goes straight to MR (or armor/CON) as normal.

The 7.5 era "hit for HPT, miss for nothing" missile weapon house-rule stands in our 8.0/Deluxe games, at least for our group and for my sanity. Damage-based magic is treated the same way, adding to HPT and not being considered separately.

Rules Design: Say It Once, Keep It Simple

I was working on the next version of SBRPG and doing clean-up work to the document. What struck me were the places where something was said once, restated in a second place, and further expanded upon in an area it shouldn't have been. We have always had a golden rule when designing rules:

Say it Once, and in One Place

If you change it, you don't worry about breaking something else somewhere else. The D&D 3.0 and 3.5 rules felt like they had this problem, especially in the skills, where you had to hunt down special cases in skill descriptions and ruling on what CR applied to what action in skill X given action Y.

When you design, you tend to use your rules document as a collection of ideas. Things get worked out, you start making rulings on different actions, and you come up with mechanical procedures. It is all good, and you need that free-form creativity and room to experiment and do the messy work of game design. You are going to get lots of repetition in a draft rules document because you are working through things.

There is an equally important step after you design, and that is refinement. I wished Paizo would have went more along the direction of their Pathfinder Beginner's Box with that simplification, that boxed set is a really well-designed and streamlined game, and a standout in the entire D&D 3 rules history of presentation and simplification. They took a lot out, and I feel the game runs better as a result.

You don't need that many special cases most of the time. If you eliminate a rule and make it unnecessary, that is just as important as designing a new rule for a new special case - and often it is more important to streamline and simplify. D&D 5 did a bunch of that and the game runs better as a result (it is less options that Pathfinder, but you give some to get some).

Refinement and simplification are excellent ideals, and a step where I feel many rules designers skip. The goal shouldn't be to design rules that cover every little case, with exceptions and one-off rules for a multitude of special cases. It should be for broader rules that cover more situations, and handle many situations with a broader and all-encompassing guideline. Special cases in rules should be seen as places where the base mechanics fail and need to be patched. Ideally, the special case should not exist, and the general case should handle every situation.

Perhaps there isn't a simple way to handle a special case, and you need the special one-off case ruling. Perhaps this is tied to some specific mechanic that you want, so the extra complexity is worth the time. I am just a big believer in elegant and simple core game mechanics, where how something is handled is self-evident and easily discover-able by players. If X works like Y, then Z should follow suit. You shouldn't have to hunt for a special case in a skill description. There shouldn't be long lists of special to-hit modifiers for every conceivable situation. Elegant is simple, and simple is elegant.

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

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

Right?

But, um, dude. What about my story?

What do you mean your story?

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

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

Dude, not cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where this Started

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

Nowadays, things have changed.

How so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reward Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding Fairness

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

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

Bounded Accuracy vs. Simulation

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

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

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

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

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

Abstract Accuracy

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

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

Simulation Games

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

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

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

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

Level Systems

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

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

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

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

Bounded Accuracy is the New Coke

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

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

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

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

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

Wonderland

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

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

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

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

Abstractionification

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

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

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

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

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

It is having it all versus being a hero without.

Simulation at the Level of Detail

There's a section in Frank Chadwick's classic WW2 miniatures game where he recounts using a squad-level WW2 war game to simulate a massive Eastern Front battle. Squad by squad they played out the gigantic battle, and the by the end they realized the outcome did not reflect reality at all. The battle never came out that way, the squad level individual fights played out, and the entire game kind of fell apart under the weight of improbability.

You can imagine a game of this size, a massive amount of gaming tables, maps covering Poland and Russia, and literally thousands of counters or miniatures tracking every vehicle crew, LMG, engineer squad, field car, tank, and supply unit all being moved in hours-long turns in painstaking detail. Every battle for a farmhouse - simulated. Every meeting engagement on a road - simulated. Each battle for a forest or hedgerow - simulated. Every tank battle - simulated down to each shell fired.

Why didn't it come out just like reality? I mean, it should have, since each man-to-man engagement was handled in painstaking detail, and a result like the one that happened in history should have been the outcome, right?

Part of the outcome of this battle led Mr. Chadwick and his designers to simulate these battles in a larger scale, with larger company and corps level units. They realized that simulating large systems down to the smallest detail does not always provide the best reflection of reality. They found if the smallest unit was a tank company or section, they could get a better overall large scale simulation than if they worried about every gun's ammunition, every broken track, and every individual squad. They could write rules that handled larger groups and simulate the historical real-world happenings of these classic WW2 battles, so thus Command Decision was born.

Of course, we do all this by computer nowadays, so why are WW2 miniatures war game rules important? What does this have to do with tabletop roleplaying?

Because today's pen-and-paper designers still make the same mistakes.

Shouldn't a detailed sectional hit points system with hit locations, rules for slicing tendons, and medical trauma charts more realistically simulate medieval combat? Shouldn't an almost slow-motion martial-arts inspired combat system with half-second turns and action points laid out for every move of the arm, swing of a blade, and pull of the bowstring more accurately simulate personal combat?

If we can simulate that level of detail on a man-to-man scale, then we should be able to put twenty people on each side and get a near picture-perfect simulation of medieval combat, right? Especially with miniatures, where we can second-by-second track line-of-sight, force field-like attacks-of-opportunity, and arrow-by-arrow ammo counts. Spells have interlaced count-down casting times. Weapons have speeds and reaches. It should be perfect!

It often isn't, and again, the too micro level of detail breaks down, and you more feel like you are playing a miniatures gaming rules simulator than you anything remotely realistic. The game doesn't know if it wants to be battle chess, a simulation or reality, or a miniatures combat game. Many games try to be everything and fail at everything. Some adopt a "way of thinking" almost like a war-gaming ideology and shoehorn that mantra-like system onto every action, even if it doesn't fit or should be handled by the referee as a one-off without the rules.

You have to be careful with games that dive into too low level of detail, or that try to simulate reality at too granular a level. There will be tons of individual rules simulating how a dagger cuts through leather armor and how that wound affects movement based on hit location and it will look cool and feel great when it happens in game. It is the same thing as the small Russian squad on the Eastern Front holed up in a snow-locked farmhouse holding off an entire onslaught of German attacks, tanks, and aircraft, becoming the heroes of the Eastern Front. Those are cool moments in isolation (and the latter is a great small scale scenario), but in the context of a larger system, they take up too much time and attention from what should be a balanced and even attention of time and focus upon the large system being simulated.

If the game is about a story adventure, yes, a wounded leg may play into that, but are the rules around getting that wounded leg so heavy they take away from the larger story-based experience the designer wanted to focus on for the game? Are all the characters in the story walking around with wounded legs, hands, eyes, clavicles, sprains, pulled muscles, and bandages covering cuts so they won't bleed to death, and the king and queen of Storyville are sitting there wondering why this group isn't in the hospital because they are in no shape to find out who stole the king's crown? If the game is about intrigue, make it about intrigue, and there is a laudable design goal to de-emphasizing things in the rules that may take away from that experience.

You can't put everything in a game and expect it does everything well. Imagine Monopoly with tax forms, IRS requirements, local zoning ordinances specific to each color group, investment income, random events like hotel fires, slumps and building booms, random economic events, a stock market, union protests, a global economy, industrial development charts, WW2 breaking out, populist elections, political wheeling and dealing, and so many layers of detail that yes - this is how a real real estate economy works, and it should all be in there, right?

After all, a game without this level of detail that focused just on buying, selling, building would be seen as too simplistic and not worthy of a true real estate game, right?

No, that stuff doesn't belong, and the job of a good game designer often lies in saying "this is what my game is about" and cutting the cruft and "cool features" that worm their way in during design. "Too many cooks" is a real problem in game design, as is "the cook doesn't know what he wants" or "the cook is trying to copy the best features of several dishes."

It's a taco with Kung Pao chicken, refried beans, pizza sauce, wrapped in a hamburger, and wrapped in a spicy gordita with cheese melted on top.

You get games that are like that, and you get things like that at taco place. It looks great on the menu, but it is typically something you eat only once if you are crazy enough to buy in. Or you're so embarrassed you bought one you start defending it and selling it to your friends.

But seriously, there is such a thing as focus in game design, and games that know what they are trying to do and focusing every rule - from character design, combat, skill use, exploration, and interaction one that one activity and making the parts that matter...matter. They also eliminate the cruft, pointless small simulation, and unneeded detail, and focus on delivering the core experience in the best way possible. If this game is about dungeoning, then let's focus on dungeoning. If this is a storytelling game, let's deliver the best storytelling rules possible and cut out the rest.

Again, we go back to design. This is what makes great products, from cell phones to role playing games.

D&D 5: In Favor of Role Playing Rules

D&D 5 adds mechanical rules for role-playing to the game. Through a system of five defined personality traits that the DM uses to grant a one-use, rechargeable, Inspiration Point, which can be saved and gives the play advantage on a roll (or used for other player's rolls).

I'm not too positive on this system, since I believe it limits the rewards DMs can give to players for good roleplaying, and it is also slightly exploitable. Unless there are other systems in the DMG that are added, I feel a little limited by this system and I find it isn't needed during the sessions we play.

However, let me think of the reasons why you may want to use this system.

Perhaps this is intended for new players and DMs who don't understand the concept of rewarding good roleplaying with in-game bonuses. If you are coming in from another more structured fame environment, how is a new DM supposed to judge and reward play that adheres to a character's personality limitation or belief system? It is an interesting thought, one that makes me think D&D 5 is actually aimed at people outside the hobby.

Think about it, if you never played a pen-and-paper game, and you don't know anyone who does - how are you supposed to know how to reward roleplaying?

This reasoning may also be behind why things are so simplified, like not including map-based combat rules. Nothing intimidates new players more than a map with figures, I have seen people freeze up, not want to touch things, and ask constantly, "Can I do this?" or "Is this okay?" It is part of learning yes, but it can be overwhelming to a new player.

It extends to the Monster Manual as well, with the simplified statistics, lower amounts of special attacks and abilities, and simplified and graphical presentation. Things feel simple because they are intended to be that way for new players.

I see some of that in the Player's Handbook too, there aren't many detailed character build options because those are intimidating, the number range is tighter because it is supposed to work across many levels, and the role of magic items has been reduced to make character builds and gear less important.

It is interesting to think of D&D 5 as a level 1 through 20 version of the Pathfinder Beginner Box, and this may be really what the game is the closest to in spirit.

Another reason why you may want to use the roleplaying rules is in organized play. As a DM, you may want to wash your hands of favoritism accusations from troublesome players or people you don't know, and use the system as a safeguard to make sure everything appears fair. It takes away some of the dynamic and social aspects of the game, but it is sort of a 'protection system' where a DM can coldly award inspiration if action X fulfills motivation Y.

You are never giving advantage to rolls that are fun or entertaining here, but in a public session with people you don't know, you don't want to appear to be playing favorites with certain outgoing players and have some people turned off by that. Removing the DM's role from some of the more interpretative parts of the game has been a theme since D&D 4, and it's possible some people are turned off by a creative and involved DM.

"Well, I can't be that entertaining or creative, and that DM is playing favorites with certain players, so I don't want to play that game."

"I would never play that. I don't even know how to act or what good that does."

You may laugh, but I have seen these feelings out there among people. It's odd, in order for the game to be more socially acceptable, the creative and interpretative parts are being ruled down into strict "yes or no" paths. To us old-schoolers where we want everyone to be involved and we don't think twice about rewarding creative play, it may seem strange to us. But to outsiders in the hobby, having these types of rules is actually "protection" for them and it is seen as something that ensures their contributions to the game will be rewarded.

Part of me feels sad roleplaying has fallen so far out of the mainstream this needs to be taught or enforced with defined rules. I guess it is like remembering the days of computing before antivirus programs were needed for everything, and picking and possibly paying for one was a requirement to get online and doing anything. I suppose I may use those rules with newer players in public settings, but then again, I will abandon them is a group feels like they are limiting their fun and we are all comfortable with my 'reward good play' DM-ing style.

Ultimately, you will play the way you want to play, but I find it very helpful to know why these systems were put in place, and knowing when they can help a group of players.

Epic Characters are Broken Characters

One of the areas of most roleplaying games that makes we wonder is the design of epic-level characters. These are typically high-level characters in the last 25% of the game's progression path. These are the earth-shaking superheroes of the world, iconic characters in their own right, and ideally, what players strive for their characters to become. Too often, game designers are content to just let high-level characters to be broken, the rules not tested or designed for high-level play, or they let the game's math drift off into this area where the number ranges are so high the original dice mean little. What's the point of rolling 1d20+30, when most tasks in the game are 'beat a 20-25'?

D&D4 was notoriously playtested less than it should have at the higher levels, the game fell victim to multiple cheats, stun locks, and other cheeseball tactics that spawned endless errata. Our group hit multiple issues with high-level balance, some classes falling off the power curve, and changes invalidating builds far too often, and it hurt our group's interest in the game. To be fair, the game was designed to have high-level play, the rules and monsters support it - it just wasn't playtested that well. The fact they needed to re-balance monsters constantly tells you something, they never found that sweet spot in play until the game's end.

Most of the 3.x D&D games, including Pathfinder, cease to be fun after level 7-8 or so, and a lot of players in our groups shared that view. The games devolve into abstract high-level math, and around this point, wizards and other spell casters take over the game, so the pure fighting class players lose interest first, followed by the caster players later on. The game just wasn't designed for high-level play, and extending the system just leads to an escalation of numbers to the point of absurdity. The old D&D 3.x Epic Level Handbook has skills and modifiers shooting all the way up to 1d20+100, and at that point, you are so far out of your original dice range things get silly.

Some of the old percentile games never scaled well either, games like Top Secret and Star Frontiers had percentile ability scores that were hard to figure out when they got into epic ranges. In Star Frontiers, if a robot has a strength of 500%, his melee skills would be something like 250% + 10% times skill level of 1 to 6. How does rolling a 205% chance to hit work? Similarly, characters could have scores of 110%, 130%, or more with some experience expenditure focused on one area.

MMOs hit this problem with no end in sight. In World of Warcraft, you could have a 60th level character doing hundreds of points of damage per hit, and then a 90th level character doing tens of thousands of points of damage in a single hit. Compare this to a first level character doing 1-10 points per hit and you'll get a good sense of scale. Some day, we will have DPS ratings being calculated in the millions of points of damage in a single hit. There comes a point where everything becomes relative, and the numbers matter little. In a way, this hasn't changed much from the old SNES RPG days where a character takes 9999 damage, the maximum they support, and dies - although the numbers have gotten much larger.

Okay, yeah, complaining is nice, but what do you do about it? A lot of these games do not understand that high level play should be different than low level play - and not just by the size of the numbers. There comes a point in every game where the game needs to change, and the game could change again at another point. World of Warcraft used to understand this, and in some games like Everquest, it still applies. In these games, certain classes have game-changing powers unlocked at certain levels, and the class' role changes. Where MMOs fail in this is that the gameplay does not change. typically, it is another dungeon with slightly more powerful monsters - maybe some new special powers are used on your group.

A game needs to know the breakpoints where the game changes, and support this. D&D4 tried to do this with tiers of play, where they tried to set expectations of what characters at different tiers of play should be doing and going. It led to a strange situation where 10th level characters were out plane-hopping, and this hurt the dedicated worlds, such as Eberron, Dark Sun, and Faerun. The game did set expectations well, but in reality, it didn't really do too much more than offer some special tier classes and more powerful monsters.

The math has to work too, and you have to set caps you can live with. If you have a game based on a 2d6 skill roll, what does it mean to have a +10 modifier? Epic doesn't have to mean broken math, especially when you take the time to design that high level experience. It is a different thing if you intend your game to break at high levels, that is a different thing, and also something we used for SBRPG1. An open-ended game where the math will break is a different beast than a close-ended game where the math breaks at the high levels. In the latter, the designers should have tweaked that high-level play experience to b fun without broken and strange math.

A lot to think about today, and also issues we are hitting in the design of 7dRPG.

Player's Pit: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game by FFG

Big Crate of Fun!

After some mail delays we finally got our huge boxed set from amazon of Fantasy Flight's Warhammer fantasy Roleplaying game deluxe set! Here is our un-boxing review:

Deluxe Packaging

I was surprised at the quality of the set! You get a ton of character cards, power cards, dice, high-quality cardboard minis and such. The only ding is they only give you 16 plastic stands or all the cardboard heroes, so we ended up 33 short. we found a deal on FRPGAMES.com that sells 10 stands for 3 bucks so we ordered a set of 4. One thing I love is that this big box game experience feels like getting a Christmas present with lots of goodies in it. FFG knows how to make game that tweak my collector's itch! I must resist ordering the GM, played, and monster add-ons before we've had a chance to get our game on with this....

Fresh Car Smell

The box has tons of room to add expansion books if you buy them, and from the look of the offerings, each one adds a different aspect to the game. they have a royals set for playing, royals, a war based set for military RP-ing and such. I love the focused product design aspect and you need to only add whats important to your game when you need it. My evil twisted royal idea may need the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Lure of Power expansion though... so....tempting....FFG...you are a tease.

*pout* Game Envy!

The whole production makes me wish other companies spent this much time on engineering the "out of box" experience like FFG does. I like the feel that you get when you get something like this. You feel like your going to have a ton of fun times with all the toys you get. You could imagine a spy game or even a super hero game with all the trimmings like this game has.

So it spoils me to the standard "hey here are two 400 page books to digest and deal with it" approach many roleplaying games have. I do respect if your a small game publisher and putting out a couple books for people to enjoy your ideas; but when you get to the big budget games, I would more expect a nice velvet glove treatment in the way Fantasy Flight Games does. It is an impressive set, to say the least.

Overall: Imposing and Impressive!

If you plop this crate on a gaming group cold, you'll have casualties if you don't do some reading and mastering of this set ahead of time. I suggest getting up to speed first in a private session s a referee and them like a seasoned and suave host, and with a little impressive swagger, plop this down on your friends and start in. My first impression is like getting a huge 10,000 piece puzzle for my birthday and then settling in afterwards to dig into it and have fun.

My First Character

Evil duke bent on carving out his own kingdom in the chaos of the Empire through deceit, plotting, and good old fashion politics. Done. We'll see how it goes with the initial session and post a second part when we get there!


Stay tuned!

~G

System Lock In: Bad for New Players?

Part of what cemented the term 'system lock in' into the pen-and-paper lexicon was D&D3. For those in the know, system-lock-in is a term taken from the world of computer operating systems meaning, "It would be hard to switch to another operating system because all my data and applications are on this operating system." In other words, switching, trying something new, or changing things on the computer would mean a substantial amount of pain involved for the consumer.

In the roleplaying world, system lock in means, "I have so much money invested in this system, and I have spent so much time learning the rules I would never even think about switching to another game system, or even trying one out." To enforce system lock in, pen-and-paper games are typically expensive, complex, and huge. Since all your friends have invested the same in buying books and learning rules, the system lock in is strengthened, and we get a 'network effect' - meaning if all your friends are locked into X, you will play X.

This is all well and good, and companies are free to write games however they want them - I support the free market of ideas. But the question comes up, is system lock in hurting the new player experience? To have system lock in, we need three things: buy-in, size, and complexity. Let's break this down in three short sections.

"Buy-in" is investment, and this typically means the game books are a substantial purchase. For a game like D&D4 this would typically include the player's book, a referee's book, monster book, and maybe one or two others. New players are reluctant to part with that much cash, so asking a new player to invest in that many books is going to be a challenge. Beginner sets are not the answer to this, they are merely an enticement to make the big purchase. System reference documents are not an answer to this either, they are often unwieldy and require hundreds of pages to be printed. Contrast this to a more new-player friendly game, like Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy RPG. These games can be bought for $20 or less, and you get everything you need to play and referee the game. An argument can be made that cost scares away new players.

"Size" is the cost of ownership, and also the amount of space the game takes up on your shelf and in your mind. This is both a physical quality (space the books take up), and also a mental one (how important the game is in your mind). Good art can increase the mental size of a game, and Pathfinder gets this down in spades. Once you have invested, the size of the game controls how often you keep coming back to it and using it. Some people equate size with fun, what is more fun: a 5' long shelf of Pathfinder books, or a quarter-inch thick copy of Labyrinth Lord? Size definitely drives away new players, it is a commitment to store and use the books.

"Complexity" is how much effort it takes to learn the rules. A game that is easily learned is also easily put aside for something new. Granted, I like complex games with a lot of options, but there is something to be said for a game that is easy to learn, but conceptually deep. Forcing new players to learn the rules for flat-footed and attacks of opportunity is cruel, we have had to do it many times, and a player new to roleplaying often gets the wrong idea about the game, "I can't get into this." The skill system in D&D3 and Pathfinder is similarly difficult to use correctly and teach, and all these complex systems intended to create options mostly make the game difficult - without adding real options. If my thief character needs lockpicking X at level Y, why make me go through this complicated skill system to get there?

Again, these are just more random thoughts on the state of the pen-and-paper industry, where things are driving players away, and how things can be made better. It seems the more we go in hobby shops, the more space is devoted towards big-box tabletop games, and less space is devoted to traditional pen-and-paper games. All the innovation in the gaming industry seems to be in the board game area nowadays, and a lot of today's pen-and-paper innovation seems stuck in the past.

It seems like we are long overdue a revolution in pen-and-paper gaming, and we get back to games made to be entertainment. Aping the tactics Microsoft and Apple use to lock in users may lock in some players, but aren't they driving off the majority or new players to just keep a few legacy users?

My feelings are if you make my pen-and-paper game more like a computer, a real computer will beat it any day of the week. New players seem to understand this concept very well, but most roleplaying game companies don't. We have to learn from the successes of companies doing well in the board game market, and innovate like they do. Really, this is the same type of game, and the same type of player. The question needs to be asked, where are all the new players going, and what is keeping them away?