Entirely Social

So I did an entirely social game of Cypher System last night, a sort of 'running around town' session that would be a stretch to call 'an adventure.' Any game would struggle to make this enjoyable, but I had a few things going for me outside of the typical "town session" I was beta-testing.

I created a list of locations and gave them "levels" to represent the venue's general difficulty in challenges. Let's say you have a bar where you can find a seat 90% of the time. I rate that bar a 1 since that is a 90% success level. How about a club that always has a line, and is how to some rough customers? That may warrant a 3; you fail the roll, are stuck in the line, and miss the fun. Maybe you still get in, but it is probably late, you missed the cool thing that happened, and the entire visit was meh.

This is the wonderful shortcut Cypher System gives you, throw a level on it and be done. The level can be used for everything from drinking games, games of darts, the level of people in a bar fight, the difficulty of finding a person of information in there, finding a romantic interest, and many other things. The more popular club generally attracts higher skilled people, since it is popular, then it is the place to be seen.

The OSR doesn't do this type of mechanic or relies heavily on 3rd party random charts. Many OSR referees will just "invent what happens" and not need anything in the way of a base challenge-level concept for anything unless you are playing the Cypher System adjacent Index Card RPG, which uses a similar "scene challenge level" mechanic. I would do the same thing there, give a bar a target number and some hearts, and whatever the players did, drink the bar under the table, start a fight, play darts or cards, arm wrestle - target number is the difficulty, hearts are what you knock down, and the special dice are used to gain progress. Reduce the scene to zero and move on to the next story part.

Some like the extreme GM fiat of the OSR, and I appreciate that when running games for others. When I play solo I like a few more mechanics to guide me in these situations. Being able to zero-to-ten anything in Cypher and whittle away with hits with effort is a nice way of resolving actions that may have back and forth. Otherwise, I use pass-fail atomic rolls and let the chips fall where they may.

You can do that with Cypher System, too, since you can derive hits by multiplying the challenge by three and find creative ways to do "damage" to the scene's "hits." Count most levels of effort as medium 4-point attacks unless you're doing something cool or special, then rate it a heavy, 6-point level of effort. Easy things that mirror light weapon attacks ease the difficulty but only apply 2 effort points.

Also, depending on the character's skills, being able to do a medium or heavy "attack" to a scene's hits may have an inability. Going for the bullseye would net a 6-point heavy attack in a game of darts, but I would increase the difficulty by one for most characters. Lose, and that 6-points goes to your "hits" (likely SPD pool here) since you took a big chance and blew it. Use whatever pool as a temporary "hit value" but don't deal actual damage (unless effort is used and points spent).

So if you are in a drinking game, play out the rounds as a defense, and if you win, knock effort of the scene's hits. Drinking that level one bar under the table will be easier than the level three one.

The one thing my setting lacked was any sort of conflict, so it was all very plain and boring. I had lists of GM Intrusions for each location, but all the game became was "visit and intrusion" which felt sort of silly. What my social town setting needs are factions and conflicts to take this to the next level. I need to be giving the characters missions and providing the opposition in their daily activities.

It is too easy to see fail in a playtest and then declare, "The whole game system sucks and I suck!" You need to step back analyze, figure out where you went wrong, and make adjustments. A list of locations with levels and GM intrusions is a great resource, but it isn't a game or a compelling setting. And it certainly isn't a story. After the session, I stepped back and asked myself, "Why did this feel lacking?" My characters were not burning their pools, no combat happened, and nothing felt particularly dangerous or risky.

I realized, no story to drive conflict, and no conflict to define factions. yes, I came at this setting from a low-level and defined a great collection of interesting places in a town setting, but the next step is to "do the homework" and approach this same setting from a high level and write the story, define the conflict, and craft the factions to give the players something to work against. Then I would need NPCs and goals so the players can go on "missions" and feel like they are progressing the story.

A setting is not a story, and it isn't fun by itself.

Mixed Genres: Renaissance & Middle Ages

The more I read ACKS and realize how much this game is like an "OSR Runequest," and the more I learn about the Middle Ages, and the more I contrast this with the Renaissance and the game Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the more I realize what a freaking mess D&D made of the fantasy genre.

Granted, Runequest is "Bronze Age," and ACKS is "Middle Ages," but the parallels are there. What are we used to? Renaissance fantasy. What are we getting? The age before, without as many world-changing technologies, without the modern tropes, and with a lower, more primal technology level and set of survival-oriented concepts and kingdom-building stories. So much of B/X thrusts you into already divided-up and settled Europe-like worlds, and you feel nothing is left to explore - with only politics and "threats to civilization" as your driving campaign forces.

In the Middle Ages, you are in the ruins of empires, discovering and settling the land.

The D&D fantasy genre isn't in the fantasy genre anymore; it is "science fantasy," with magic replacing science. This is as bad as people thinking all science fiction is Star Wars or every space adventure should be Guardians of the Galaxy. By default, the D&D genre is Renaissance-flavored with "magic Star Wars technology" thrown on top. Everyone is a Jedi Knight/caster class.

100% Recycled Fantasy Content

And we could be in a better place. Fantasy feels stuck in D&D, and while this started with Tolkien and the Appendix N greats, the genre now is just recycled tropes and stereotypes done over and over. We have always stayed in the typical D&D fantasy style, and we can always escape its generic gravitational pull. Today's D&D fantasy style is like when people complained about "corporate rock" in the 1980s; it sounds like it was made for radio play, please, no guitar solos, and keep it ear-friendly and non-controversial. And corporate rock really had no artistic or musical merit.

It sold well, and it sounded good, but what was it?

And these days, we are stuck in this horrible generic "corporate fantasy," and you know it when you see it. It whitewashes any injustice or conflict inherent in the genre, ignores history, and the world is essentially a modern world dressed up in Renfaire clothing full of cosplayers and cartoonish tropes.

It does not even feel like fantasy; it feels like a "dress-up action battle game" where you are meant to win, and the same generic tropes enable these almost "Power Rangers" style fights where violence as conflict resolution is encouraged. The consequences of using violence are ignored. Using magic to kill enemies and blades to hack living things apart is "okay" and "fun."

And these tropes and almost ignorant simplification of the world become a part of the modern-fantasy genre, and you see this recycled again and again. To escape it, we either need to do new and different things or go back to the past and rebuild the genre entirely.

The Renaissance

You look at the actual Renaissance, and you have the origins of:

• Colonialism
• Slavery
• The Killing of Native Populations
• The Modern Banking System
• The Wealth Gap
• The Founding of Nations
• The Rise of Science and Modern Knowledge
• International Trade
• Modern Religion
• Climate Change
• Environmental Destruction
• Wars as Commerce
• Gunpowder, Coal, and Oil and the Printing Press
• And the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

Yes, there is a reason I prefer Lamentations as my Renaissance game and not D&D because a horror game better fits the era and all the destruction and damage that we are still living with to this day. Renaissance societies were lavish and wealthy because they went around the world killing native populations, enslaving them, and stealing their resources. The characters in a Lamentations game are as guilty as characters in a horror movie and meet the same ends due to their sins and greed.

But my D&D world is a fantasy world, not that! In the real world, the empires used gunpowder and science to subjugate native populations; in D&D, it would just be magic. Look at the magic in a D&D game and figure out how today's corporations and governments would use it. Yeah. It isn't good. it almost is a Robocop-level of corporate greed bad.

D&D characters with their ultimate powers thematically feel like the "have it all" western society.

They have that "savior complex" built in. Granted, the hero has the same thematic arc - but a hero typically has to fight against the odds, going from zero to hero. D&D characters start as entitled and get more entitled. And they reach the ultimate epic levels of entitlement, where they are too entitled to even face death. D&D characters feel too invulnerable, especially at higher levels, and that is a problem for basic storytelling.

They are all Superman.

The Middle Ages

And a setting change to the Middle Ages would not help since that would not fix broken rules. Also, the Middle Ages were not so squeaky clean either, and you have:

• The Fall of the Roman Empire
• Nation Building
• The Crusades
• The Silk Road
• Vikings and Marauders
• Mongol Invasions
• The Dominance of Religion over Society
• Religious Wars
• Inquisitions and Religious Persecution
• The Rise of the World's Major Religions
• Peasantry and Serfdom
• Religion's Persecution of Science
• The Destruction of the Old Faiths and Gods
• And, of course, let's end it all with the Black Death

If the Renaissance is Star Wars, the Middle Ages is "hard sci-fi" Traveller. And there is a clear difference between the genres and times. My lists are a bit loose and have a lot of overlap, but in gaming, there are some things more Renaissance than Middle Ages, and I see the concepts and themes mixed all the time. And it drives me crazy.

I like the Middle Ages as a fantasy setting. It strips away a lot of the more-modern themes in a Renaissance game, and brings the entire Conan-like "ancient culture" decline into sharp focus, and pits that "old ways of magic" against the "new religion" and of course, the seeds of state power. It gives us the typical "destroyed empire" to explore and rebuild in, and many lost cities and places of ancient power. The fight between the old ways and the new is happening now, and by the Renaissance, that battle has been already won and the fleets of empires are out sailing the world and killing off native populations. The Middle Ages does have a very 4X "survival horror" feeling.

The modern D&D genre is this strange recycled reality built off Tolkien. Then it goes through a series of game world transformations - Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, the D&D 4 and 5 planar cosmology, and pop culture rebranding. It gets mixed with the MCU and anime, and it just is this own reused and regurgitated set of assumptions and standards that feels "D&D" to us. It is very much like recycled cardboard, endlessly derivative of itself and repetitive. Even the art style feels "D&D" after a while, and you can tell immediately.

The easiest way to resolve it is by saying D&D is not in the fantasy genre anymore.

D&D is its own genre, like Star Wars is its own genre (and not sci-fi).

While D&D is Renaissance-flavored, it isn't really that time. This is science-fantasy. They play on the Renaissance tropes, though, sometimes to their detriment (Spelljammer's art comes to mind). Instead of hiring and cultivating visionaries, they rely on the past 50 years of fantasy gaming as their genre. They endlessly recycle, borrow, appropriate, and copy, and I feel they suffer for it.

Just like Hollywood.

Not Real, Recycled

I have a bit of D&D fatigue, like Star Wars fatigue. I go back to my real history books, and I read, and I get this feeling the recycled modern D&D genre is just too corporate and clean. It feels sterile. It feels overly safe. There does not feel like there is any conflict built into the setting, nor is there much danger. Play a high-level campaign, and you realize that all the danger is manufactured, death is impossible, and failure is infrequent. The entire game feels like a video game in "easy mode," you are meant to win, and you get the option to skip challenging sections. And you can jet off to other planes and live in utopias if you want.

I crave the real these days.

I crave enlightenment, not entertainment that repeats ideas from the last 50 years only, like some sort of Hollywood nostalgia time loop. I feel stuck in the D&D genre, and I can't break free. Even now, the way I think about fantasy feels stuck wearing the D&D rose-colored glasses. To get away from this, I need to play OSR games.

I need my history.

I need lower fantasy and OSR games that give me that "real" feeling. I don't want magic to be the answer to every problem (another D&D trope) and for every class to have magic. If most of the classes are casters, magic isn't special anymore. One D&D is making more classes full casters - thinking magic will fix a broken class design. It won't. You will have D&D 4 all over again. Everyone is a caster, and nothing feels special.

Magic is Not Technology

We also have the pitfall of "magic is technology" in the modern fantasy genre, and you end up giving it to every class thinking technology solves all your problems. It can create more problems than it fixes.

And thematically, magic in history was never technology. It was always heritage and culture, peoples' beliefs, and that faith created temples, great cities, and pyramids. To say magic is a metaphor for technology is to colonize magic with the Western ideal. It is not that, nor was it ever. Magic as technology was never a thing, and I bet it was made up by 1950s advertisers trying to sell toasters.

But most of all, the nature of magic created the universal set of myths we all live with - and we are born with. Magic is metaphorically myth, and myth is rooted in culture and heritage.

Why does that ship sail through the stars, and the city float on an island in space? Is it because you need a cheap science-fantasy excuse to make that happen? Or are those concepts part of a culture and part of their beliefs and ancestry? If you say it is the former, you take away the latter.

If magic is an essential part of a culture, you give power to the people of the world and cultures.

If magic is technology, you worship and cede power to the corporation.

Magic has no resource cost! You can regain spells and cast them as much as you want! Magic is progress! And you replace magic with the climate-destructive consumer culture, and you begin to see why modern fantasy is so "corporate-friendly" with these concepts. You make people ignore the costs of progress and power, and you can continue to siphon money from them by playing on that belief that all progress comes without a cost.

T&T: Trollworld

Trollworld is an interesting setting, and one I feel is highly underrated. This setting has been the home for all the Tunnels and Trolls solo adventures and has spanned the entire history of the game.

Now, as a preface, this is how I see the world. You may see it differently. You may have not considered the setting in depth, or you may have played there for years and done something entirely different. One of the beautiful things about pen-and-paper gaming is how we see the world, or a world, begins a great epic inside our minds and those of others into creating a unique setting and experience. We may all start in the same place, but where we end up is a beautiful journey.

Part of my change in thinking about this world involved the following concepts:

Dark Humor

This is very much a setting that hits pop-culture references from the 1900s to the 2000s is a dark humor sort of way. One could say this makes the world a more lightweight comedic affair, but I see this differently. The Warcraft universe does a lot of pop-culture references and no one bats an eye. You can see them too in the Warhammer universe, and people are like, fine.

In my view, pop-culture references have been in this world for tens of thousands of years because wizards have been visiting Earth (and many other worlds) for all of that time. Not just one Earth, but tens of thousands of alternate Earths and realities - over and over again. They may have destroyed hundreds of these Earths, enslaved some of them, and half-destroyed hundreds more and then forgot about them. Wizards visiting them may have left for them or gotten killed and nobody knew better.

Not just Earth, but potentially tens of thousands of different worlds, timelines, and realities - even on alien worlds. Expand your idea of 'pop culture' to include a million different realities and worlds, and get outside of the televised group of realities. Include fiction too, since this is magic and magic makes the impossible happen. A wizard could find Alice in Wonderland and zap a deadly version of it into reality. Then forget it ever existed for a thousand years as the place is overrun by monsters, twists into a frightening new form of nightmares, and comes back and consumes its creator.

Also, Trollworld is the home of monsters. And monsters are known on many worlds. Thus, the connection will never go away and it influenced the world as monsters have influenced Earth. Say a new monster is imagined on Earth, then that could be created here. The rulebook says:

Arrange a pirating raid against a settlement of Vartae, or have an evil wizard cast the characters into the future of the Wild West, or further yet into the space-faring world of Buck Rogers or Captain Kirk where technology works and magic doesn’t—or perhaps it does anyway!

Any scenario, any piece of fiction or nonfiction can be mined for inspiration, from Sherlock Holmes to Kipling’s Mowgli, from classical Greece to the African veldt. Anything can be adapted with a little work and imagination on your part. Don’t stop at the tunnels! There are countless worlds beyond the dungeon.

The door has been opened, but realize this...

Countless doors to countless worlds into countless futures and pasts have been opened for the last 60,000 years. This is not a setting that is damaged by cultural references to Earth (and likely many other worlds), that stuff has been floating around as a part of this world's history.

Some Earth figures from history might just be walking around here...

Not Human Centric

So many fantasy worlds are written to mirror Earth's history, you know, the one where humans were the only intelligent life on a world. Or the game's creators write the world's history as if the inhabitants on it were humans and act the same. On Trollworld, humans are not the dominant species. They may have came here 45,000 years ago and built great cities and civilizations in the past, they are not the dominant force in the world anymore. 

After all, the trolls were here first, and after that elves and dragons. Trollworld, these days, belongs to the monsters. Check your human bias and privilege at the door, lunch-meat.

Well, your empires are gone and human cities are few and far-between. There are many places where humans are hunted, and only a few where they walk among monsters freely (but watch your back). You are not going to be a softie, civilized cosmopolitan type in a royal carriage with a poofy hat and pantaloons looking down your nose and pooh-poohing those wretched creatures as you trade with them. You are going to be a barbarian king type saying take my trade deal or I will sign it myself with your blood. In fantasy gaming, it is too easy to fall into the Arthurian tropes of chivalry and proper social behavior. This world is much more savage and brutal than that.

Human kingdoms might take land nobody else wants, and fight tooth and nail to scratch out an existence between the borders of large monster kingdoms. Approaches to human cities may be channeled up narrow gorges and chasms with thousands of ambush points and fortifications before one reaches the massive city gates. The city itself may be cut out of the canyon walls, or the ancient ruins of an old serpent empire among the cliffs with old temples and halls repurposed for human inhabitation.

T&T cities aren't reflections of modern times; nor are they clean, ordered, and boring analogies of today's metropolis centers. They are a savage reflection of a world inhabited by monsters, broken, twisted, shattered, and rebuilt a thousand times by the next group of inhabitants. And they are definitely not entirely human, as humans are transplants to this world.

This is why the contents look like monsters. Some may say this is silly, but to the monsters, this is a brutal reflection of vanity and their disregard for those who live here. The world is supposed to feel alien to humankind.

Legends

Power means using it. There is a reason characters in this world have ability scores above 100.

They need to be able to walk up to a dragon and punch it in the nose - and have it stay down. This is why characters start as D&D first level nothings and end up with ability scores way above 100. Just like in the Epic of Gilgamesh you will be able to throw a bull for a mile, cut down many trees with one swipe of an axe, or reject the advances of the gods themselves because you are so damn good looking. This is one of the key advantages of the game, D&D ability scores, for the most part, never change (or change very slightly), all the way up to maximum level. T&T ability scores ARE your character level. Yes, you are supposed to be that strong and that smart. You are a legend.

Also, this is an 7th and 8th Edition rule where your highest prime attribute divided by 10 is your character level. Earlier editions got into XP charts and other methods, and I prefer this new way of determining level since it gives the player the freedom to decide when they level up, and gets rid of the level chart entirely.

A Savage World

I don't really want to say "this is Conan" because it is not. That is too easy, and it is also too limiting. The savage barbarian king trope completely applies here, the world feels like that and that model of character can be played with great ease here. Some of what the Conan style brings to the table applies, but the world is much more than that.

We don't want to limit ourselves to just humans and the human experience in fantasy. Think if a monster, say a troll, wrote the Conan novels from a troll perspective, and your mind will start to wander down the correct pathways. My son was born, so I started a war against all the other troll tribes we were at peace with so my son could see what victory looked like! My son rode on my shoulders as he watched me slay a thousand trolls! 

It makes no sense. This is not how a human world works. It feels alien to our experience.

Similarly, magic. Yes, a human may have been the most powerful wizard in the world, but there are equally powerful non-human wizards, such as elves, fairies, monsters, and many other races all practicing the greatest magics. This is why the spell names are so simplified, such as "take that you fiend!" The real spell names are probably unpronounceable grunts, growls, clicks, scratches, and other sounds from beyond the nether.

We tend to think of magic in the D&D sense. You have wizards colleges, magic shops, mage towers, men with long white beards and pointy hats, gaggles of magic students, democratized magic, and this notion of magic being a cosmopolitan force that betters humanity. There are acceptable uses for magic, and others that are frowned upon. Oh no! Do not upset my pseudo-Victorian moralities, nor violate my the limits of our game's precious balance!

I half-joke, but you get the point here. A lot of fiction and gaming tends to use magic as a metaphor for the Internet, technology, communication, or progress. It almost always leaves the world a better place. It is a force aligned with good, change, and exciting gameplay options. Magic is a part of our character builds, and explains all the fantastical powers and options at our disposal! Also, magic is balanced, part of every class feature, and doesn't break our game.

Magic is a convenience of the modern age.

T&T's magic comes from an earlier time. It will break those chains holding you back or seriously mess up your day. It will flood a valley full of innocent villages, summon a demon, crack the earth in half, set a town on fire, or blast a 20-foot tall troll in half with a blast of lightning. Magic is power. Just like our barbarian can cleave a boulder in two clean halves with his great-sword my mage and point a finger at it and vaporize the stone into dust.

Magic is savage, brutal, unbalanced, world-changing, game-breaking, and a force to be feared and reckoned with. You do not want it used against you, and you certainly want to use it against those you don't like. It is also non-human, alien, and something even those who mastered it don't fully understand.

The Rules Make the World

I am a big fan of letting the rules make the world. If a game reflects a certain reality, then I run with it. Yes, you can use T&T to simulated a King Arthur game or Robin Hood - and it works well. However, if I have a goal in mind to simulate the savage, unhinged, brutal and dangerous settings found in some of the solo adventures - and mesh that with what I read in the Trollworld atlas - I let the rules guide my creativity and let the game help forge the world.

Magic is alien, wild, powerful, and unpredictable. A 110-pound STR 5 weakling serf can become a muscle-bound barbarian king. Rogues can vanish into thin air and balance on the head of a pin. The world is not entirely human. This place has been lived in by multiple civilizations before ours, and the move-outs left a mess. We don't belong here. The non-human perspective is the dominant one. Monsters rule this world. Gates to other realties have been opened throughout our history. Not everyone here...comes from here.

You take those statements and start world-building.

You start thinking.

And what seemed like a simple setting in the back of the book becomes something much more compelling and interesting. This is not like any of the other "fantasy theme park" settings that are typically out there.

It is a place in our imaginations called Trollworld, and it is what we make of it.

Old-School Gaming is our Minecraft

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

"But does it play Minecraft?"

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

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

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

All choices are good, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D&D 5: The Past Ain't Really Better

One small thing that bothers me about how D&D 5 is being sold is the over reliance on nostalgia. Yes, I like old-school gaming. But there is a nostalgia that dungeons such as the venerable Tomb of Horrors or the Temple of Elemental Evil were somehow great dungeons that stand up to the test of time. I also like the classic settings like Grayhawk and Faerun, but another part of me feels these settings just don't hold up very well today. Do they have any cultural impact or relevance today? Are they places that speak to today's fantasy stories, or just yesterday's?

It is the danger of nostalgia. We have strong feelings about it, since this is what we grew up with. Of course the Tomb of Horrors is great, because it was great. Right? Does it speak to anyone today? Is it something the thousandth play through is as exciting as Skyrim or Minecraft is to today's game players?

I will take Skyrim and Minecraft over a deathtrap dungeon that has seen its better days in older versions of the game. The new games speak to me. They provide new challenges, force me to look at the world in different ways, and in the case of Minecraft, give me unbounded shared creativity with others. They are relevant, and they are the canvases where stories that mean things to people are told today.

Now yes, you make your own stories with D&D 5. You don't have to use the old settings and modules, and that is great. There was also a classic sense of 'role balance' in the older versions of the game that is brought up-to-date in the current edition. There is a lot of good stuff and great ideas there, and the new creative team tried to update that while still keeping a sense of creative continuity in the game's feeling. It's good, and a nod to the popularity of the OGR games that kept the faith and the original spirit of D&D alive.

So why am I restless? I guess because I want something that speaks to me. I want a new campaign setting like Planescape that shakes up how I think of D&D, and the stories I can tell with it. I want a creative team that challenges my preconceived notion of D&D being a game that is the best way to re-play nostalgia like a classic 80's arcade game collection, to something that speaks to me as a fantasy gamer today.

There's a line in the new DMG that says Game of Thrones is an inspiration, but to me, the world of Westeros isn't D&D. It just doesn't feel like it, not in this version which feels more like Pathfinder light and a greatest hits of D&D 1-4 to me - and both of those are good things, mind you. But Game of Thrones isn't everything I think a new D&D could be. It is so much more.

I feel that D&D 5 is a good game without a great setting. It is missing something, a sense of place and adventure unique to the rules and built by a creative team that challenges our assumptions of what D&D can be, and what it can mean to us.

Take a look at computer games. There was sandbox gaming and fantasy roleplaying before Minecraft and Skyrim, and sandbox and fantasy roleplaying after those games. They made such a huge impact they changed their genres forever, everything before and after will be compared to them. This is cultural impact. This is what I want in a fantasy setting.

I feel it isn't enough to redefine the past with a new set of rules and a new coat of paint on classic modules and settings. I want a game and setting that defines the future and how we speak about fantasy gaming for years to come.

ArcheAge and Theme Parks

DarkgarX and I have been playing around in the Archage MMO lately and I walked away a little disappointed.

It is a game that promised unlimited freedom trading, building, and PvP - with a huge sandbox world. Our experience has been a typical level-based grind through a series of camp-to-camp quests that seemingly have no end. The PvP is endgame content at 50, and most all of the run up to that feels like a traditional MMO quest-based themepark grind.

It is important to understand the difference between a sandbox and a themepark setup for a game world. Themeparks are tightly controlled settings with clear quest lines, progression, and typically feature strong player protection versus any interference to leveling. The fact that our pair of characters is near level 30 out of 50 and we have not seen or had one PvP battle is depressing.

In old World of Warcraft, the PvP fun started at 20. In the old Warhammer MMO, it started at level 10. Both were a blast to play, and you learned your PvP role quickly. Both of those were still themeparks, but at least they made a conscious effort to start you with PvP early.

In Archage, I feel like PvP is held away, your character is auto-protected, and there is no war of big conflict I have any connection to. The game is beautiful and has wonderful technology with placable houses, farms, mounts, vehicles, ships, and all sorts of other really cool stuff, but I am not feeling the conflict or fight affect my character in much of a way.

Most of the house and farm building is locked up behind quests, and you can live and farm in a protected zone, so there is nothing much at risk for your placable structures.

In a sandbox world, everything is on the table. You can be ganked by level 50's in the starting zone, and even by people supposedly on your same side. There is no sides, it's everyone for themselves. If you want to team up for mutual protection, you are free to do so. If you want to form a guild that protects your new players, go ahead. It's up to the community to create groups and environments based on their desires, play styles, and wants. Yes of course there are problem players, but in these games community and social order usually creates safe havens to get started in.

EVE Online is a great example of minimal protection to start, and then letting people fly free and do whatever they want ion 0.0 space. It has a tiny themepark to get people started, and then cuts you loose in a universe-sized sandbox. It's a great experience.

Sidebar note here, on themeparks in MMOs and roleplaying games. I am becoming tired of them. They feel like engineered experiences that are boring and predictable. They are filled with the by-the-numbers lands and content. I don't need a Disneyland-style  "Egypt Land", "Future World", "Ravenloft Land", or a "Norse Land" in my games, nor does it make sense to me in these worlds. How would you feel if Lord of the Rings had these places added in by Hollywood types?  

For some people, okay, fine; but really, every world I play in doesn't need token tip-of-the-hats to every Earth culture to fill up some development and marketing bucket list. It's just, no, I feel it's just lazy and unimaginative. Plus, everyone's doing it.

If I want an Ancient Egypt fantasy game, I will set it in the original Ancient Egypt and paint D&D rules and monsters all over it. It's fine, you don't need to create a pseudo-Eygpt for me and fit it in some other world somewhere. Maybe now that you don't need to create this place, you can build something original and put it where you were going to put this.

To it's credit, Archage doesn't have these silly places, but it does have the same themepark structure as many other MMOs. The camp-to-camp grind is hard to want to play through, the "chosen one" plot line is the same for thousands of players, and it just feels like it tried to go in a bold new direction, but it fell back on the traditional MMO themepark-isms. We will likely play through our time and see what happens, but I am feeling a little down about the game.

What do I want? I want that free and open game where the actions of the community and players matters. It's tough, you get a lot of hype and pre-release journalism from everywhere, and your expectations are probably way off base than what the game finally ends up being.

Specific Worlds vs. Semi-Generic Games

There's always been a conflict in pen-and-paper gaming between specific worlds and "semi-" generic games.

Lord of the Rings vs. D&D

Star Wars vs. Traveller

[cool movie they borrow from] vs. Shadowrun

That last one is a bit humorous, but it's true, Shadowrun typically borrowed cool idea after cool idea from various fictional and cinematic sources and stitched them together in a narrative. Think about that. It's essentially the D&D model as well. "It's the best of everything!" tends to be the rallying cry of generic fantasy gaming systems, Pathfinder among them, and D&D was born out of this belief.

Purists, of course, like to play in specific worlds. How many times have you tried to play generic sci-fi with a group  and heard "It's not Star Wars" or Star Wars did not come up at least once during the gaming session. You cannot get away from the big pop-culture franchises no matter how you try with some groups, and that is all some groups will play.

Same thing with Lord of the Rings and gamers who prefer the original source material to D&D's odd menagerie of things pulled in from everywhere, plus what Lord of the Rings has. D&D's odd mix is a genre to itself nowadays, so repeated and used repeatedly it has became a specific game world in itself, a copy of the copies of the copies - that people copy.

Copying isn't bad, but it does create strange bedfellows, and often requires a lot of hand-waving to explain. The more you add to D&D or any game for that fact, the less believable it gets, and the less playable it gets. It's the "Universal Rule of Game Gluttony" - generic games expand until the point that they die of over-expansion.

The more books you buy, the worse it typically gets.

Contrast this with specific worlds, and no, Expanded Universe Star Wars does not count (and even Disney got rid of it likely because of the Universal Game Gluttony rule). With specific worlds, the cannon is already set in stone, and that's what you have to play with. With some, you can even choose to play with a subset of content (everything in Star Wars and Empire for this game, the rest is out).

Side-note, I like games that are smaller and more specific, expand-ability usually isn't a big selling point for me or my groups. It's always nice to have new stuff, but we are at the point today where desktop and web-publishing models can easily super-size a game to a degree where no one can collect or play it all. More is not better.

Some games try to create their own universes and have you play in those. These are often difficult to find an audience for, either you have a big commercial property that everyone knows, or you have a generic game that can ape along with the times. Finding a group excited about a niche world developed by a role-playing game company is always a tough thing and a hard sell to new players.

It is tough to sell a new world in today's climate, because the licensed players are bigger, make more noise, and have legions of fans with instant communication 24/7. Even if you did make noise, it is still a challenge being heard unless you are a known designer or have something really, really unique.

In a way, it's why we have the semi-generic games we do. They get around the licensed property hurdles by leaving up what people want to borrow from pop-culture to the individual group, and the fact these games are built to do so gives people that avenue.

D&D 5: Openness and Campaign Worlds

There's a quote in the new D&D 5 Monster Manual that says the monsters in the book are "yours to do with as you wish" and mentions making minotaur shipbuilders and pirates. Or anything in the book anything you want. There is also a "do what you want" support for classic settings and campaign worlds, allowing you to roll things back to the setting you loved.

There is a new-found openness in D&D 5 that I find refreshing. I would love for them to back this up with a community license that lets 3rd party companies play and publish, but we shall see. D&D 4 had this in it's "build your own" campaign world setting, but it feels the Nerrath-centric model has been rolled back in favor of classic settings in this edition. One sore point with D&D 4 was the sloppy retconning and treatment of the iconic game worlds where so much was changed it hurt longtime fans' perception of the brand. We need to see the D&D 5 DMG to see how far the new-found openness goes, and the game's assumptions of world-building and how far they want you to change things.

It feels like there are limits though. The numbers are tight, the magic item power is low, and the game has a particular low-fantasy feel. You are not going to do a typical MMO with gear-flation and massive item power with D&D 5, because you will break the game.

It is interesting to compare this openness with Pathfinder, where the default Golarion world feels like a sticky ball that prevents you from making a new world because there's room for everything in the default campaign world. Of course, nothing really prevents you, and the Paizo Gammastery Guide is a great resource for world building, but it is just too easy to stay in Golarion since "why go anywhere else?"

It's like the Walmart effect on small local businesses, Paizo's Golarion has a tendency to crush any other third-party game world around it with a single and focused specialty. Why create a "Ravenloft" style Pathfinder world when Golarion has a dedicated area just for that? Oh, and you can go get shoes, hardware, and frozen foods while you are there too. To compete with that, you need to be a big player, like Midgard or any of the other "big box" game worlds. The barrier to creating a third-party world players care about is high, since the default world covers everything and is so well-known to players.

It almost feels like the Forgotten Realms back in the day, that setting was so big in players' minds that it crushed anything around it. The difference was the Realms had this "author protection" effect where different areas would be "owned" by different book series, and the world had to go farther and father out to find spots that were unexplored and open for adventure. And then the fiction caught up, and farther out still you had to go. The Realms also was not as heavily "theme parked" as Golarion is nowadays, with spots for everything, a giant Sphinx, an Eiffel Tower, some pyramids, a Caesar's Palace, oh wait...that's the Las Vegas Strip.

I get that and Golarion confused sometimes.

You know I kid, but there is a little truth to that. I love Pathfinder and Golarion and The Strip, it just feels sometimes the weight of Paizo's single-world business model limits my creativity, or more importantly, the willingness for players I play with to want to play in anything else but the default setting. In contrast, D&D 5's dowhatchawant sort of relaxed focus on settings and creativity appeals to my creative side, Wizards is trying to repair a lot of customer animosity after the D&D 4 schism, so there is room here to mend fences. It remains to be seen what Wizards ultimately does with campaign settings and how heavy-handed they will be when it comes time to release campaign guides, but I am getting positive vibes now. I am hopeful.

At least the community seems tired of the system wars this time around, and everyone is free to play what they want. Thank goodness somebody's wish was heard. Go forth, playwhatchawant, build your worlds, and keep role-playing alive and well.

Faerun: No Monsters Edition

So we had a D&D 5 play session last Sunday, and armed with my new Player's Handbook, DarkgarX and I settled down to play in the Forgotten Realms setting.

Lacking a Monster Manual or module, the ground rules were as follows: there are no monsters in the world. To keep true to the spirit of the game, dragons and other creatures were 'legends' often talked about but never really seen. Oh, and the short monster appendix in the back of the book? Those are in, and that makes skeletons and zombies available for use.

I know, for all you Baldur's Gate and other D&D video-game players, this borders on the unthinkable. With no monsters, no orcs, no gnolls, no goblins, no beholders, no giant beetles, or anything else creepy crawly, what is there to do?

The answer came quickly, and the game took a pleasingly dark turn. Humans and other intelligent races quickly filled the gap the monsters left, and there were all sorts of thieves, maniacs, bandits, evil merchant guilds, dark elves, demonic cults, secretive necromancers, criminals, and other intelligent opponents you could shake a stick at. They started coming out of the woodwork, and nobody knew who you could trust or who has some sort of evil agenda.

On the positive side, there were plenty of distressed merchants, temples needing assistance, town guards trying to keep order, haughty royals, crowds of onlookers, and many other neutral and good NPCs who played a part in the action. It was interesting to see the factions and other groups in the world come alive and actually matter.

For the Realms, this was perfect. I've always imagined the Realms to be very strong on characters, factions, and personalities, and this strange turn of events made the role-playing and story systems in D&D 5 actually see some use at our table. The over-nerfing and elimination of strong and powerful NPCs in the Realms role-playing supplements (especially 4th Edition) just felt so wrong to me, and this is why. The Realms thrives on its powerful NPCs, and the good ones are just as important as the evil ones, because you should never assume glowingly good and pure PC motivations.

Oh, the "PCs are always of good alignment" assumptions of world designers, please go away. Saying "high level NPCs will always come in and save the day" makes no more sense than it would in this world, and it is a unrealistic and silly assumption about how a real world works.

You can't roleplay with most monsters, but you can with intelligent humans, so we had a blast. Players were forced to make serious decisions about moral quandaries, it wasn't assumed every hole in the wilderness was some dungeon filled with XPs, and adventuring meant involving yourself with the factions and people in the various locations in the world. We had a chaotic good thief PC agonizing about stealing from 'good' townspeople to get by, which was just pure role-playing gold.

The wilderness felt empty, but who cares? We spent the majority of our time in Arabel, and nobody really cared about getting lost in the woods. Factions of evil NPCs started coming to light, the average townperson's problems mattered, and the temples of the various Faerun gods saw some use. It surprised me how little we missed the monsters, and how well evil factions of humans and other intelligent races filled in for them.

Part of me gets this 'baby food' feeling with some monsters, that some are designed for low-level play, and they go on up from there. It's one of the things I liked and didn't like about D&D 4 was the video-game progression of the monster types. With character races as enemies, players did not know what level they were, and they had to judge fights and be a little careful not to get in over their heads. Beautiful stuff, that careful thinking ahead and judging a fight. It was a pleasure not hearing "goblins are wimps, no problem" for once at the table.

It's always been true in D&D that character classes made the ultimate enemy, and to have a world 100% devoted to that was fun and challenging.

The bad parts? The outside world felt empty and a lot less dangerous. There was really no reason to go exploring or adventuring in the traditional sense, and I could also feel the world grow a little less fantastic. There was also a reservation that the simple motivation of "bash the monsters" was gone, and players longed for places where they could just smash things based on shapes rather than have to roleplay motivations and worry about stories and justification for the guards. We switched to Pathfinder the other day, and when the monsters appeared in that setting, it felt like a relief.

It highlights the over-reliance of "monsters as motivation" for some games, and this is likely a byproduct of "monsters as XP source" in many games. Monsters, they are just so easy to use to get the players moving, aren't they? It's a problem, and a crutch too easily used in place of real stories and conflicts.

Still, without a Monster Manual in hand, this was a fun experiment, and it actually fit my feelings of how the Realms works better than a lot of the 4th Edition material did. I am tempted to keep the Realms this way for my 5th Edition games in it, and just make this world about evil and the dark hearts of man. If this world sees monsters, they would be legends encountered sparingly, demons would need a pact to be summoned (and not walk around freely), and single dragons would live in caves far away from the world of man. The monsters are needed to fill the role of legends, but putting evil characters in the spotlight made this world come alive for me.

I could never fill a dungeon full of orcs in this world ever again without feeling like I am taking a shortcut. This experiment has made me rethink of the notion of what a monster is, and if they ever reappear in this setting, they will definitely be more fantastic, out of the normal, and special than they were before. Don't let the "defeat thousands of 3d shapes" assembly-line mentality of MMOs make you discount what one monster can do or be in your game.

It's a "monster", after all, there has to be something to that word other than "XP with a funny shape."

But still, there is something far more satisfying and real about the inhabitants of the world taking up the torch as "monsters." You do not need a Monster Manual to play, nor do you need modules. Just crack open the Player's Handbook and say, "That's all there is in this world, everything else lives in legend."

Points of Light vs. Evil PCs

One of the most interesting concepts codified in D&D 4 was the concept of world narrative. This is the whole idea of the "points of light" narrative of the world's situation. Put simply, the world is full of evil, and only a few outposts of good remain as the last holdouts of goodness in the world.

There were a number of assumptions that went with the Points of Light concept, including:

• Good does not fight Good
• Evil does not fight Evil
• Monsters are everywhere
• Most good races get along with each other
• The world is dangerous!

Okay, granted, this makes for a default fun and action-oriented world. It is a lot like an MMO in fact, where if you step outside of the towns, all bets are off. Keeping the races friendly makes it easy for everybody to find groups and to pair up Drow and Dragonborn - if the Dark Elves are fighting the demonic Orcs too, why not team up?

Now look at the above and think, what does the Points of Light model do? For the most part, good gets along with good, and evil gets along with evil. The world is a battleground, and heroes are needed, especially the good guys. There is a built-in bias to the world that presupposes a giant good vs. evil fight.

It feels difficult to play a neutral or evil PC in this world model. It is like an MMO, it assumes you are good guy. It feels like attempting to roleplay an "evil PC" on an online game with two factions that can't intermingle, you can stand around saying you're evil all you want, but the world isn't setup to support being evil at all. In fact, an evil PC in a points of light game is more a monster and disruptive to play in a party full of people trying to save the world.

Mind you, I still love points of light, it is an 'instant action' and classic world model, but it does have some interesting quirks that I'd like to explore. Also, place aside the problems of playing an evil PC for a while, I just want to think about the question, "Does the world model support diverse play styles?"

Take a normal, typical non Points of Light world. This place has your typical Medieval Europe farms and hamlets scattered about, rolling hills, dark forests, and snow-capped mountains painted in the background. Monsters are not the norm, they are the exception. This is not Points of Light, it is more a "Farms and Hamlets" setup, where the average piece of countryside is safe and normally Dark Ages. You may have a bandit or two lurking out there, or the occasional war between kingdoms, but on the average, nothing happens out there in the vast wilderness.

It feels like the world Paizo is building for Pathfinder. This may not be how every referee runs Pathfinder, but when I see maps with scattered farms and small hamlets in some kingdoms, I am going to assume there aren't a lot of wandering monsters out there in the countryside to gnaw on peasants. There are some dangerous places, but it feels like many of the kingdoms are by default mirror their inspirations, if a place is based on Medieval France, it is just like Medieval France. For some areas of the world, demon scars and vampire lands, this probably does not apply, but there are "safe zones" in the world.

If feels easier to play an evil PC in a normal or semi-normal world, since there is no default assumption of how the world expects you to act. There are more opportunities to choose evil or choose good in a world that isn't under siege, and thus more player freedom. In a way, Paizo's adventure paths typically leave it up to the group for how their characters get along, and I have never really had a problem running evil PCs through them - everyone has their own motivations to participate, and even "personal gain" is an evil-friendly and acceptable motivation for participation in an adventure path, even with a group of good characters.

I haven't got my D&D 5 PHB or DMG yet, so the jury is still out on the default world assumptions. With the lower power levels of the game, it could go either way in my eyes. Low-level monsters are still dangerous to high-level PCs, so this may make the world a more dangerous place. But, a mass of low level villagers can beat off high-level monsters, so the mass of people may push the world towards a more normal place. I need to read the default assumptions about the world to make up my mind about it, and see what view of the world they adopted for the game.

Theme Park Worlds

You know what would make Star Wars better?

More Star Trek.

This feels like the strange thinking behind theme park worlds. Before we begin, what is a theme park world? The best examples of these are the old Mystara D&D setting, the universe of Space Opera, the MMO World of Warcraft setting, and of course, Pathfinder's iconic Golarion setting. These are worlds that include a little bit of everything, a Gothic horror area, an Egyptian area, some place like Game of Thrones, a dungeon area, a sci-fi area, an Orc horde area, and just about any other pop-culture fantasy trope adapted for generic pen-and-paper or online gaming use.

We end up with these improbable worlds which feel like a mish-mash Vegas buffet of ideas and adventure opportunities - look, there's something for everyone! There's an old saying if you try to please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no one, and at least for me, that's how I feel about these types of worlds.

What bothers me about them? Well, some of this came up yesterday in my post about Hero Lab, and I wanted to break this down into my top seven reasons of what makes theme park worlds less compelling for me.

#1 The Escape Hatch: Tired of living under the Vampire Counts? Sure, let's go next door to the Happy Kingdom and take a break from this constant Gothic oppression. If you aren't forced to live in a dangerous world, you take it less seriously. The decisions you need to make don't feel as important, you don't take matters of survival and careful political planning as having any real consequence. Sure, if you start a game in "Gothic area" at low-level ytou get the feeling, but at high levels when the characters own a fortress in the Happy Kingdom next door, all of a sudden those scheming Vampire counts seem so distant and far away.

#2 Disneylandification: Theme parks by their nature are improbable collections of everything within walking distance. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to cover everything and keep people moving through to see constantly changing sights and sounds. Each themed piece of the theme park needs to be less than the whole, as the entire experience is what we are here for. The 'rides' sit next to each other with no real history or reason, and they exist simply because they offer another option. Because there is this air of improbability, by its nature the overall creation is taken less seriously.

#3 Stuck in Time: Wouldn't the Orc Horde just sitting there up to the north have crushed the Happy Kingdom by now? One thing about theme parks is they don't change all that often. Oh, there may be new restaurants and rides every so often, but their purpose is to move people through and entertain the masses with similar experiences. Due to this fact, they often get stuck in time, where the Gothic Kingdom will never be crushed by the Holy Kingdom, and the Happy Kingdom will always be the same happy place it's always been.

#4 No Clear Villains: Or too-many villains in some cases. Of course Game of Thrones would be better with Lord of the Rings' Sauron somewhere in there, and also the Harry Potter Death Eaters as well. Imagine all the villainy! If you had a world where just the Vampire Counts were the big bad guys, your conflicts and enemies would be clearer and a lot more focused. If you have a Demon Scar over here, Vampires over there, Orc Hordes in this valley, Evil Fae here, the world feels like there is no clear conflict and drama. Good fiction writers tell you to simplify, and it feels like there are several worlds waiting to get out and shine on their own in here.

#5 The Mighty Averages: Because your rules has to support every option and every social structure, you can't all of a sudden say that the worship of Gods in this world is limited and persecuted by the evil powers that be.  This can be confined to an area, sure, but you may want to make story decisions with certain classes, like having all druids be a part of an ancient order of the Winter North. In a theme park world, every class has to be everywhere, and you can't make over-riding story decisions for your world anymore. You may only want one church to support the creation of paladins, but in a world where anybody can be a paladin for any reason and for any god, they feel less special and less linked to the world's story and central conflict.

#6 Does Nothing Well: People say theme park worlds give you everything, so you don't need anything else. Well, true, if you don't really care about a focused and quality experience. A focused game world on one particular subject will always be a better experience than the theme park version. Imagine a vampire count type world with detailed histories, families, biographies, lands, conflicts driven by the vampire counts, wars, magics, legends, secrets, and mysteries all in one glorious, focused tome. It will be a more dramatic and focused experience just because that's all that book does, and the creators do not have to worry about supporting other ideas.

#7 The Comic Book Effect: All we play is Vampire Counts. Look Egyptian enemies from Egypt-land! Oooh, shiny! There's two answers for this sort of a problem. Either your vampire count area wasn't compelling enough to hold their attention, or your group is suffering from a comic book effect where things have to constantly change in order for interest to remain high. I like Game of Thrones and other dramas, and those worlds don't have to get so crazy by introducing all sorts of crazy comic-book monsters and villains with all sorts of funny shapes and costumes. Humans really are all the villain you need in some game worlds, and you don't need four bestiaries full of funny shaped critters to have a great story. Less is more, and running a game that tosses in constantly changing threats gets tiring because there is no central villainous threat, and you are constantly looking for the 'next big thing' to top the threat the party just vanquished. Psionic beings from the nether-dimension? Oooh, even shiner!

Mind you, I like Pathfinder's Golarion setting, it is beautiful and offers a lot of places for adventure. However, as the game matures, I feel there is a need to break out and explore new worlds. I am craving focused, dedicated settings that just take one topic and do a hell of a good job with the source material. I am imagining a Vampire Counts world all done out with a Game of Thrones level of detail and history, with no extraneous distractions, demons, orcs, or Happy Kingdoms in the world to take the focus away from the conflicts in the world. You step into this world, the steel cage door is closed, and you have to live in it to survive.

Can you tell a story like that in a theme park world? You could, for the first few levels, but as the party's magic and travel options broaden, the escape hatch cracks open a little bit,. and the 'ooh shiny' other conflicts in the theme park world attract them with their new sights, flashing lights, and happy music. I want a world without those distractions, where Count Dracula is my world's big bad 20th level necromancer, and all the families and backstabbing vampires underneath him scheme and plot to get the upper hand. It feels difficult to run a high-level game in a theme park world with the Demon Scar sitting to one side of Dracula's castle, and the Evil Pharaoh King sitting to the other.

Sometimes, you are in the mood for a tight and focused experience, and as a game-master, you want that control. While the freedom and options provided by theme-park worlds is great, there are downsides and trade-offs should you choose one as your campaign setting. As a game-master myself? I'd rather be known as the guy who runs the cool and fascinating Vampire Counts setting, rather than someone who runs the stock world setting very well.

Design Room: Eberron

Welcome back to another edition of Design Room, not really a review of a number of gaming books, but more of an in-depth look into the game design aspects around a series of books and the implications on game play. For reviews, I shall steer you to other sources, like Amazon, we are interested primarily here in game design, theory, and impact on referees and players. Today we look at one of the biggies in a retrospective, D&D's Eberron game world.

It is important to note that Eberron is still the setting of games like D&D Online, but it doesn't seem to be getting any D&D Next love as of yet. It had a number of 4E supplements, which we will get into, but the fate and status of the world is very much up in the air right now. It is not a good thing, Wizards has far too many worlds to support for the company's focus, and it leads to none of them being supported all that well. Let's start with the D&D 3E Eberron Campaign Setting as the starting point for our delve into the world of Eberron. Mind you, this is not a complete review, nor can we cover everything, we will be hitting some high-level stuff, and reflecting upon the world and game design implications and consequences of these choices.

3E Origins

Eberron started out as a contest-winner in the D&D3 days of a 'create a new D&D game world' contest Wizards put on in the waning days of D&D3. Why they did this is strange, they already had a number of incredibly well designed game worlds, including Faerun, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, and the shelved worlds of Mystara and Birthright. One thing you need to remember was this was the heady days of the beginnings of a number of modern MMOs, and the bug one at the time was World of Warcraft. Perhaps Eberron was the first step to making D&D relevant to that crowd, a fantasy world with steampunk elements with an over-the-top look sounds a lot like...World of Warcraft to me. If true, this makes Eberron the first D&D4 product released, a change in tone from what came before, and also a clear statement of change in the direction of the product.

Eberron is very much one of those worlds that never really had a place. Faerun was the home of the big-money fiction, and Greyhawk was the official setting of D&D3. This seems to harken back to the old TSR's habit of creating too many game worlds to support, and D&D3 always had this multiple-personality complex where the main books were heavily Greyhawk-centric, and the other worlds were' oh yeah, them too' add-ons. Eberron seemed the least-liked child, but it was definitely the most unique and cool. A smart choice would have been to keep all the Greyhawk stuff out of the main three books, and support all worlds equally. You shall see this 'what world do we support?' question come up later, so keep this in mind.

3E Theme: Factions and Kingdoms

The MMO elements are clearly here, a number of strongly rethought races with motivations and a unique flavor, a ton of internal orders and organizations which fight and shift alliances, and a number of pseudo-governments that serve as the backdrop to the larger conflicts. It is important to note that point, the governments of Eberron are backdrops, thematically, they aren't as important to the world as the major players, the Dragonmark Houses being the largest and best defined, followed by all the local factions unique to each kingdom. Again, this is like your typical MMO, and again World of Warcraft. While major nations can fight and even the players can take part, for the most part, the big stories are with the organizations that control the world, and most of these reside between and even above the governments. The kingdoms are 'zones' and the interesting action happens across them.

There is a balance between governments and power groups in the campaign guide which is interesting. The government is given one section, and all the power groups their own following. This is done for every major area of the world. This tells you two things. The first is that unlike other game worlds, the big players are the power groups - they are clearly given more weight than the governments. While a power group may be itself the government, this is not supposed to be a forever thing, different groups can get the upper hand and control the government. It is a fluid and dynamic situation that is clearly different than any previously published D&D game world. The second is that this is a game about these groups and all the plots between them, again, the governments are supposed to take a back seat to the games these groups play.

Again, you can find a mirror in World of Warcraft, with groups like the Cenarion Circle, Order of the Silver Hand, the Guardians of Hyjal, Hellscream's Orcs, and all the other classic WoW factions. Orgrimmar is a kingdom, yes, and it has a government and background all its own - but who controls it on any given day can shift and change depending on what is currently going on between all the background groups that are fighting over it, playing politics, and running plots. Eberron is the same way, and it is important to understand. Friends characters make in one kingdom may or may not be there when they come back, and their political situation may have changed dramatically as well depending on the current stature of things.

Contrast this with other D&D game worlds, where nothing much changes. In Faerun we get the stereotyped belief of, 'Oh I can always go to kingdom X and contact NPC Y for help, they are always good, and enshrined here by the fiction.' In Greyhawk, the same can be said, although it is typically, 'Oh, Kingdom X is lawful good, that is a safe place and they can help.' In Eberron, nothing is guaranteed, and if the players want change, they will need to get out there and do the leg work to support the factions on their side. Note this point, this is clearly the #1 most important thing about Eberron and why it is different than any other world that came before - or after.

World Design In 3E: The Wow Factor

Another clear point of differentiation between Eberron and any other world is the 'WOW' factor. Throughout the original 3E Eberron book, a series of incredible art pieces lays out the world. Cities aren't boring concentric castles surrounded by urban sprawl and squalor; they are grand matte paintings of towers built on top of spires of rock, floating castles, cities built in alien ruins, and a whole imaginative smattering of out-there ideas.

It is perfectly normal in Eberron to have cities built in underwater domes, in the middle of volcanoes, built on the underside of floating mountains in the sky, on crawling robots made out of stone, floating on rivrs of magical ley lines, warping in and out of reality, or anything else you can imagine. Similarly, temples, ruins, fortresses, and any other adventure locale can be just as way out there and cool, and in fact - it is expected. We can go as far as placing monsters and magic items under the cool umbrella as well - these need to be unique, fun, different, and engaging. If it is not cool and unexpected - it is not normal. This is major point #2 about the world, note this.

One of the cardinal rules of Eberron goes like this, "If it is in D&D - it has a place in Eberron." Note that for some things in D&D, like the Drow, they get pushed to the side in this world, they are clearly not as important as they are in either Faerun or Greyhawk. This brings in a lot of material, for good and bad. On the bad side, it is a very chaotic world, with a lot of stuff going on at once, and a lot for the DM to grasp. The 3E Eberron book does a lot to sort this out, and attempts to give everything its own spot so you don't have too much going on at once.

The good part is that this opens up the door for unlimited creativity for the DM. "In D&D" covers a lot of ground, any book Wizards put out, anything from other D&D game worlds, D&D Modern and Future stuff, anything from third-party publishers - anything. You can literally beg, borrow, and steal any idea out there and put it in your game world. This is not only allowed, it is encouraged. Eberron is uniquely situated to be the "game world to end all game worlds" and is written to be that way.

3E: Magic in the World

The magic in Eberron is uniquely designed. Low-level magic is so common it is ubiquitous, everyone has it, and magic is a part of everyone's daily life. A farmer could have a magical self-powered cart to haul hay, magical robots to tend crops, a magical hot-water tap, and all sort of other pseudo-conveniences taken from the modern world, fiction, or any other source the DM can imagine. High-level magic is ultra-rare, even more so than other D&D worlds. You simply don't have a thousand wizards living in the world that can cast the wish spell willy-nilly. You don't have high-level interventionist NPC spell-casters shaping the world with magic. High-level magic has been pushed back, is rare as Hades, and is a special thing again. Resurrections don't happen every day, bucko.

This is another interesting point, and a fun design element. The factions of the world are left duking it out with lower-level spells, casters, and powers. They can't simply scry or cast their way to victory, they have to put boots on the ground to get what they want. This is a good thing, and it keeps the world interesting. See that group of enemy soldiers? They may have a low-level caster or two with them, but they were sent here by that faction that does not get along with you, and they really want to recover that high-level magic artifact before you do. Oh yes, shades of Indiana Jones are back, and they are groups in the world that want those items of power more than you do, and are willing to use force to get them. Cue the music, we need to get in and out fast, Indy.

Having high-level magic reduced also makes high-level PCs more powerful and special, and they are now major players in the world rather than 'one in a million high level NPCs.' This also puts PCs at a distinct disadvantage, once you think about it. All these lesser powered factions will start to notice high-level characters in the world, and the pressure on them will increase. Having a high-level PC allied with an opposing faction may cause another faction to try to eliminate the high-level PC just to keep the balance, so the world gets a 'self correcting' power-balance that is a very interesting place for PCs to operate in.

All of a sudden, it isn't wise to flaunt your power, you never know who might be jealous of you, and there just may be someone else out there who really doesn't like you all that much for who you are. Come to think of it, maybe the reason this world has limit of high-level magics is because it tends to kill of ff and weed out high-level threats ll its own through the groups and politics of the land. An element of danger for high-level PCs just because of who they are? Unthinkable in every other D&D game world. Major point #3 here, note this.

4E: Things Change

Along comes a new edition of D&D, and things change. Picking up the Eberron Campaign Guide, you will notice one thing right off: where did all my cool art go? Gone are all the cool pictures of floating castles, amazing contraptions, and cities perched on the top of rocky spires and alien ruins. There are a couple, but a disturbing trend happens in the book of normal art of castles surrounded bu urban sprawl and squalor.

Where are the cool illustrations of the dragonmarks, especially the large ones? Those took up a huge portion of the book in 3E, and they are now gone. Where is the cool Heavy Metal style Mobius art in the chapter starts? You know, those pieces that gave a tone and flavor to the world, almost like a mature comic book? Gone again. A lot of art was removed here, so much so it changes your perception of the world.

Point #2, the coolness of the world, has been severely reduced.

This hurts, and yes, some of the original art is maintained, but a lot of the important pieces are lost. In the beginning of the Campaign Guide, we get Sharn, a floating city, and a pretty typical castle on a lake. Most of the rest of the art is the typical 4E 'character battle' art, and not really world-specific. Sharn seems like the only cool place here, and the 'open door' to creating fun adventure sites and cities seems to have closed some. This is a great example between the 3E and 4E books of how art can totally change the perception of a game world, and really needs to be recognized and studied.

4E Eberron Factions

Even the iconic sections of the area governments and factions have been muddled, done away for and replaced by random adventure seeds, monster stat blocks, mini-adventures, and plot hooks. Another huge step back, and the individual sections for each kingdom just seem like articles in Dungeon rather than something that lays out tense political conflicts. There doesn't seem to be a coherent world anymore, and even though some of the same factions are mentioned, there is no focus, and each area just seems like a single adventure to burn through.

If you have both books, compare the worldbook sections. Sure, the 4E maps are pretty, but the 3E books seems a lot tighter on focus of the lands, factions, government, places, and interesting sites. We get huge stat-blocks for monsters, and mini-adventures. The factions are either gone, or moved into the adventures. We don't get the feeling that these places are really fought over anymore, or that anything can change, nor are NPCs that important anymore. The 4E 'War on Powerful NPCs' continues here, with a majority of Eberron's big players missing or sidelined. With no powerful NPCs, and a lessening of the important of factions, something is lost.

Could it be, point #1, the focus on factions, is gone?

The 4E Campaign Guide is a huge step back. Room had to be made in the Eberron Player's Guide for all those lists of rote 4E powers, and the referee's book has devolved into a copy-and-paste section of DC History checks that take up way too much space. If all you know about Eberron comes from the 4E Guides, you don't know Eberron. Seek out the original Eberron Campaign Setting book and prepare to be blown away.

The 4E Rules in Eberron

Granted, I like 4E's rules a lot better for Eberron-style action roleplaying, as they are more cinematic; but then again, something major has been lost here. Once thing you notice is that the art in the 3E Eberron book to a point looks like the art in the 4E books, in fact, most all of the 4E books. It is like Wizards decided to transplant the cool from Eberron and place that into every D&D world - yeah, it is all like that now.

I like this tone, but as for putting it in every D&D world? It didn't make much sense in dramatic-novel Faerun, and it surly doesn't fit all too well in old-school Greyhawk. They took Eberron's coolness, turned it into a whitewash, and painted it all over everything they could to make everything seem just as cool. It didn't happen, nor was it correct in many cases. For Nerrath, yes, it worked, and it worked well - but realizing where this cool came from is just as important, and how it can mess things up is another thing.

Faerun is more of a LARP-y, dramatic, almost romance-novel world full of dramatic action. Geryhawk is the original gangster of old-school death-trap dungeons, dour and deadly in its outlook and survivability. Dark Sun is even the way it is, different, Mad-Max, post-apocalyptic, and cool. They each bring a unique 'cool' to themselves, but they are not the over-the-top Eberron 'cool' - nor should they be. They each are special, they each deserve their own tone, and they are not the same as Eberron. To do so is to not respect their special culture and flavor of the worlds. You can't transplant a new 'cool' onto a world without a reboot, nor can you make a world something it is not.

4E Magic in Eberron

Magic too, has been changed to the 1 to 30 D&D4 run, where everyone lives in this MMO-style progression path. Gone is the unique low-level/high-level magic disparity, and the world loses yet another interesting and cool aspect. In the old world, level 6 to 8 characters were the movers and shakers. In the new, it seems like we are back to the lets-get-to-30 grind, and we lose that have and have-not fight in the original world.

Remember, in 4E you start plane-hopping at level 10, and the original world goes away for the Feywild, Elemental Chaos, and all the other theme parks of the 4E cosmos. In Eberron, the focus is solely on the world - it is the center of the universe, and the place to play in all the way up to max level. All of a sudden, Eberron is just for the first 10 levels of play, and we quickly move in a whole new group of worlds into the mix. This water-down syndrome affects all the 4E worlds, including Faerun and Dark Sun - both of which should not have a Shadowfell and Feywild, but they do, since that is what 4E is, and the game loses something without them. For a world to be the central focus, we need to stay in it.

With the loss of magic and clear focus on the world, point #3 seems to be gone too.

What are we left with? Something that is definitely 4E, with some of the action-adventure cool, but none of the original fun stuff that made the 3E world so special and cool. Note that some of these things were tied to the original implementation of the 3E rules (like magic level), others were because 4E tried to adopt the Eberron coolness (Faerun, didn't work), and the others I cant explain (the loss of factions and the focus of the world). Part of this can possibly never transfer correctly, like the magic-level, due to the change in rules.

The loss of focus on the world's unique faction setup is the most puzzling here. It seems like they used the same model for all of the D&D4 campaign books, the DC History checks, the turning every area into a mini-adventure Dungeon magazine article, and general same-ness of the treatment of each worldbook for 4E. It didn't work for Eberron, and a lot was lost. Another thing was a lot of material just didn't convert in all too well, and some of the most interesting parts were ignored, like the dargonmarks - losing the higher-level art for them was huge.

The connection to old-school World of Warcraft is weakened too, while the D&D4 1-30 MMO track is here, the original world inspired by the fantasy-steampunk inspiration seems missing, and all the cool movers and shakers have been replaced by mini-adventures. Remember, the focus of a 4E world is away from ppowerful NPCs, so the 'powerful factions and NPCs control the world' theme of the original Eberron can't happen in 4E - the focus is supposed to be on the adventurers, Points of Light, and the whole 'alone in the world' adventure theme. This is one of the fundamental differences here, 4E's focus is incompatible with 3E Eberron's focus.

Where Art Thou, Eberron?

Part of me thinks they put out too many campaign books for 4E, and maybe they should have just stuck with Eberron as the only and official 4E world. Granted, they needed to keep what was cool and not cut so much art, but then again, it is probably a limitation of book size and format than purposefully limiting content; or they just didn't understand what the 'cool' was here and thought it was just like any other game world, medieval and static.

They would have also had to consider Eberron's magic-balance as well, and wrote 4E around that balance. It is an interesting problem, the design of a generic rules system for all D&Ds seems to have gutted the world of its unique mechanics and flavor, even though Eberron was designed under the generic 3E system. Part of the world depended on those items and rules in 3E worked, and in fact, the "anything in D&D" rule is part of that. Eberron is a redefinition of the 3E world in a new and interesting way, a new way to look at things. If all of a sudden, we lay 4E on top of that, we lose what we were looking at in the first place, and the world just becomes another implementation of the 4E ruleset. We are not looking at anything differently here, this is the same 4E, just with different kingdoms and peoples.

You also potentially have a situation where players coming into Eberron having played 3E understand the world and what is cool, and players introduced to it via 4E are sitting there wondering what the fuss is about. Why is this any cooler than Nerrath or Faerun, it's all 4E action-adventure, right? Well, people that understand the original source material know, but the new players have a different perspective on the world. Combine that with the loss of focus on the world's factions and unique magic setup, and Eberron becomes another 4E world with nothing really special about it other than two new classes, some magic items, and a map.

Eberron is cool, and the 4E version is a nice piece of work - but it is not the same world. From a design perspective, there is a lot to learn here about world design, reboots, rules systems transplants, and a whole bunch of other stuff just waiting to be explored. There are two different design goals here, one for 3E to present a new and exciting world, and another for 4E to transplant the rules and theme of the new game into the existing world. Like Faerun, the transplant is not 100% successful - but for different reasons. Examining why this happened tells you a lot about the subjects we study here on the blog, game design, world design, and what makes something interesting and fun.