High Numbers Should Mean Something

From the halcyon days of 2008, and the workshop of 4th Edition, comes this testimonial to the Ever-Rising Statistical Treadmill as design principle:

For example, we strongly disliked the inability of 3rd Edition D&D’s negative-hit-point model to deal with combat at higher levels—once the monsters are reliably dealing 15 or 20 points of damage with each attack, the chance of a character going straight from “alive and kicking” to “time to go through his pockets for loose change” was exceedingly high; effectively, the -1 to -9 “dying” range was meaningless. 

Okay. You've already survived two or three blows that would have pasted a lesser character. You are still on your feet and alive. And you are irked that the next blow certainly would kill you dead. You feel entitled to more, somehow, as a hero.

Think of it this way instead:

• When, as a low level fighter, you are one wimpy blow away from permanent death - you are at -5 hit points or something, unable to move or do anything else.

• When, as a high level fighter, you are one mighty blow away from permanent death - you are on your feet, able to flee, distract, negotiate.

yawn

This is known as a qualitative difference between low and high level play. It's what makes a giant's tree-limb club truly scary, rather than being just a force-multiplied kobold shillelagh.  Or to be (urk) simulationist about it - if negative hit points represent the wracking of your body instead of the wearing away of your heroism, how the hell does your twelfth-level body attain the durability of titanium, as in 4th Edition with its negative hit point threshold based on half the positive total?

Let's take another failure of imagination:

Ask any high-level fighter whether he’d prefer the second-to-last attack from a monster to leave him at 1 hp or -1 hp; I’d put odds on unconsciousness, and how lame is that?

Hold on. This preference has to be based on monsters who you know will rationally leave alone the fallen heroes to go after the living. In the world of Wizards D&D, are no creatures sadistic, hungry, bent on kidnapping, or mindlessly corrosive? Shouldn't you be just as worried about ending up on the floor in a dungeon fight as in a bar fight?  Don't some monsters save their second-to-last attack to see what your head looks like when it pops like a coconut?

What's more, we are also imagining heroes who at 1 hp, or even 10 hp when fighting an average 20 damage dealer, irrationally fight on, instead of realizing they are near death and they need to go home NOW. If being unconscious is so great? Then fall down and fake it after the blow that turns you into a 1 hp fighter. The monster will go on to the next guy automatically and you probably won't even have to make a Bluff check.
Whatever system you're in, as I've mentioned before, approaching combat like a Rock'em Sock'em Robots toe-to-toe battle game is to blame for these absurdities. Fighting should be deadly, cruel, guileful - and it should not feel the same when you're battling orcs at level 1 as when you're battling giants at level 8.

D&D's Modular Bounty

Last night the players met the Three Fine Gentlemen, who in the Dragonsfoot module "Red Tam's Bones" are set to bedevil the players as they go about the quest of recovering the bones for the good of the Holy Church and the erotically haunted Duke's daughter.

In the course of conversing with these foes, my players realized they liked them and the roguish, departed Tam better than they did the sourpusses of the Church and State, their ostensible employers. Avoiding a donnybrook, they still got experience from the encounter, and a new tip - perhaps the spirit of Red Tam could be found elsewhere, placated by other means?

"Yes, but ..."

So off the railroad and on to  the Faerie Road to a certain Market, from where it should be possible to find the Winter Court wherein Red Tam's spirit might be found ...

Oh YEAH. The thing about D&D is that, over nearly 40 years of this game, there is an insane amount of material that is more or less compatible with whatever version you're playing. Need a Faerie Court? There's Ravenloft stuff and 3rd edition stuff  and even a tasty-looking module from the renowned Wolfgang Baur which comes wrapped in a 4th edition crust ...

Well, despite the wrong turn in later editions, D&D's basic simplicity makes it ideal for improvised, free-running campaigns like the one I run. And sure, there are plenty of other simple systems. But what I appreciate about D&D is the ready availability of material - to be modified and hacked and hijacked to be sure, like my players hijacked "Red Tam's Bones," but that's part of the fun, and having the D&D corpus at my beck and call means I only have to put in a fraction of the work.

The Two-Class Rule

In a class-based RPG, who should be able to do what? Let's divvy up the job of the dungeon crew into:

• Frontline fighting
• Ranged fighting
• Control and utility magic (charm, hold, sleep, etc.)
• Healing magic
• Trickery and troubleshooting (traps, locks, overcoming obstacles)

And introduce the basic class types from Advanced and Basic D&D (left to right, fighter, magic-user, cleric, thief, then dwarf, elf and halfling):

The chart should be self-evident. The thief is a bad ranged attack class, in AD&D anyway, because it's restricted to the one-a round sling rather than the two-a-round bow. Yes, the cleric has some troubleshooting spells, but in practice they're overwhelmed by the impulse to stack multiple heals and Hold Persons. You could also see the dwarf class in Basic as a kind of troubleshooter, although limited, thanks to stonework abilities, dark vision and the ability to fit into small places.

If I could graphically show each class/job as a profile over levels, you'd see the thief starting with weak and unreliable abilities, while the magic-user eventually far surpasses the fighter as a ranged shooter. For now, it's enough to comment on the things that this chart reveals about the "original game":

1. There's a fairly obvious bottleneck where the cleric (or variant classes)  is absolutely necessary for healing. This combined with the other abilities of the cleric make it a golden class, yet often derided as "boring" because of its support role. I'll get into why healing is so great in another post, but I'll leave it for now with an observation that experienced players know the cleric is a must-have member of the party.

2. The thief also has a fair monopoly, with the wizard's troubleshooting powers at low levels being one-shot and limited. This doesn't tell the whole story across levels, though, and this is why the A/BD&D thief is generally considered weak. At low levels the thief's abilities are pretty terrible, while by the time that  thief gets up to reliable powers, the magic-user is starting to learn troubleshooting spells of a whole new class - invisibility, fly, ESP - that completely overshadow what the thief can do. The only drawback is that to memorize those spells means to forego more combat-oriented ones. Adding insult to injury, a wizard throwing 3 darts a round is a better back-rank shooter than the thief with 1 sling bullet, even leaving aside the wizard's ranged spells.

3. Dwarves and halflings in BD&D are pretty much redundant with the base classes, but elves are their own thing.

Just for grins, here's the chart for the Wizards versions, showing how little 3rd edition changed this picture (except for the welcome step of making rogues competent ranged attackers finally) and how much 4th edition changed it, to the well-remarked "anyone can do anything" soup.

Now, what do I want for my game? Some designers see it as a virtue to specialize each class further, so that the optimum party contains all four. Others see it as a virtue to allow variety in party composition, so that no one class is strictly essential. James Raggi's Flame Princess rules are built on the former assumption, though in practice his improvements on Basic D&D has more to do with the profile of ability across level; making only fighters improve in hitting, and making specialists much more viable in what they do early on than rogues, for example.

Recent experiences in play have shown me how dependent on the prophet class and its healing abilities my parties are. This is a little embarrassing because prophets are supposed to be rare, semi-outcast members of society. The urge is to stick in another class that can heal; thus, recently, the druid. I don't think every class should do everything, but I do think everything should be doable by a choice of two or more classes. Call it the two-class rule.

So here is the chart for my 52 Pages system, and more info can be found on each class under this search. The system assumes that characters' hit points are more like "heroic courage and luck" that gets worn down in combat, so "healing" hit points is actually a matter of giving a sufficient pep talk.

With this in mind, two classes beyond the prophet and druid might qualify for HP restorative powers. One - a commander-type based on the fighter, kind of a secular paladin.

The other ... I shudder to mention it ... is the bard. Now, I want to have this class in my game, it makes a lot of sense, but please let it be anything but the bard, or the other awful alternatives (minstrel? gleeman?). Seriously, I would rather have a jester class doing this than a bard, and that's saying something.

4E D&D Is The Oldest-School Old-School Game Out There

If you recognize that roleplaying games started when wargamers started personalizing rigid sets of wargame rules, refereeing acts of guile and subterfuge as preludes to Napoleonic battles ...

If you also open your eyes a little and notice that some players are not just using the tightly regimented episodic skirmish combat rules of D&D 4th Edition out of the book, but doing roleplaying "cut scenes" to shape the direction of the campaign around them ...

Then "let's drop some roleplaying around this set of wargame rules" is the oldest school play mode around.

Defenses and 4E

As part of our complicated stateside travels, the spouse and I stopped into a friendly local gamestore last night (Fun-n-Games in Blacksburg, VA) and took up an invitation to help make up the four-player quorum in a D&D Encounters session.

I don't think it's a particularly new observation that the Fourth Edition is not The Devil. Indeed, the DM worked a few social skill checks into the lead-up to the combat (defending innocent caravaneers against a flock of stirges) and the system, I think, could be adapted to roleplaying in the classic style with no need for artificial skill challenges. The game does put things out front and center and gives even starting players a wealth of obvious, individual, heroic strategic options, as opposed to having to figure out that in order to survive you must soak a mule in lantern oil, tie a charmed torchbearer to it, and lure the hobgoblin squad back into your ambush point where you roll spiked barrels full of rocks on them. So, it's a beginner-friendly game that more than anything resembles GURPS.

We skulked away clutching our participation prizes, which will be useful as apotropaic repellents should we ever be ambushed by zombified grognards. The Fortune Cards, though, were not as fun to add "in bed" to as fortune cookies.

The 4E system puts the fortitude, reflex and will saving throws on the same mechanical footing as Armor Class (all four are "defenses" against different types of attacks). This does bring up something I have wondered about. In classic D&D, dodging a lightning bolt is a "saving throw" that goes up by level, while dodging a sword swing depends on "armor class" that doesn't go up by level.

This doesn't seem quite right. If anything, the distinction should be between the defensive nature of armor (protects regardless of the wearer's awareness, might not work against beam-type spell effects) and agility (needs awareness and freedom to dodge, but more able to escape spell beams and other metaphysical ills). You can see this ambiguity in how attack-type traps are handled in pre-3rd edition D&D; sometimes a peril like a swinging blade or arrow trap is handled as "survive a hit roll as from a 5th level fighter" while other times it is "save vs. petrification or take 2d8 damage."

The next revision of my own game system will most likely do away with saving throws against physical contact - though things like poison and charm, testing resistance of body or soul itself, will still use them. Instead, effects that depend on physical contact may "ignore armor" (lightning bolts, for example), going against only the dexterity bonus and any magical protections. Or they may include armor (fireballs, for example) and so require some form of hit roll to do full vs. half damage. Dexterity bonuses, of course, will be ignored for unaware, unconscious, or incapacitated victims. This goes hand in hand with my plan to give small dodge-based AC bonuses to rogues (and possibly fighters too) as they go up levels.

I guess the question is, does it matter who rolls the d20 - the bolt caster, or the thief jumping away?

Oh yes, the nonviolence comments inspired me to start work on a whole damn nonviolent adventure generation system, in place of the single nonviolent adventure. That, I swear, will be the next post.