On Zak S.

If you asked me to draw a picture of an apple, I’d probably whip out something that looks a lot like the logo for Apple computers. From an objective viewpoint, the logo really doesn’t look like an apple. It’s flat, usually colorless; a gross simplification of the real thing. Like eyes in the paintings by ancient Egyptians or the modern smiley face, it’s more symbol than reproduction, an easily recognized and processed shorthand that, by itself, conveys a simple idea and then gets out of the way. These sorts of symbols play to our assumptions (no matter what color Apple’s logo, we all know apples are red) and work as a very convenient shorthand in our day-to-day lives.

When my mom paints apples, they look like this:

You don’t need to look closely to realize these are some really messed up apples. They’re a dozen different colors at once: red, yes, and green, but also blue, grey, purple, violet, various shades of yellow and gold and even white. What the heck is wrong with my mother’s eyes?!?

My mother’s eyes don’t just see what is assumed, but what is actually there. Take an apple and really look at it. Don’t just let your mind process “apple” and then speed off to the next thing. See it. See how the skin retains hints of every color it’s ever had as it matured from bud to fruit. Notice how it reflects the light and with it the colors of things near it. See how even the red is actually a complex mottling of various colors, nearly pointilist.

My mother doesn’t paint apples as we expect them to be. My mother paints apples as they really are, with the parts we miss in our daily lives highlighted, brought into focus and shoved in front of our faces, where we can no longer ignore all that we gloss over in our headlong rush to towards five minutes from now.

That’s not something all artists do, but it’s something that many good artists do. This is exactly what people mean when they talk about art giving us new eyes to see the world with, of helping us see and appreciate what’s always been right in front of us.

It’s something Zak does. When Zak decides to make a gaming book and asks, “How can I make the cover useful?” or wonders, “What else can we do with dice when we roll them beyond just seeing what number is on top?” he’s doing the same thing my mother does when she paints apples. I love getting into things with Zak because I know he’ll see what I miss. He doesn’t gloss over the things I just assume. Zak takes ideas to the next level and asks questions like, “What does it mean that Tiamat has five heads?” and “How can we convey the important stuff about our settings in a way that the DM will actually remember and use at the table?” or even how avoiding immersion is part of the fun in our immersive fantasy games.

Perhaps most importantly, Zak calls me on my bullshit. (Oddysey is also indispensable for this.) You need people to do that to keep you out of deep, stifling, and creatively barren ruts. Of course, some people love wallowing in such ruts and hate being prodded out of them.

Nobody has asked Zak to drink hemlock. Not yet. But folks have gotten grumbly. The world, as seen through the eyes of an artist who sees things as they are, lacks the comfortable assumptions that most of us need to get through the day. Some people simply cannot endure what the eyes of such an artist see. Sometimes, they’ll lash out bitterly at those who knock over or ridicule the illusionary worlds they’ve built for themselves.

They’ll also lash out at you when you accidentally bump up against the set-dressing you can’t even see because you don’t share their illusions. Just something to keep in mind.

Playing with Kyma - the Market District

The ocean-side port, warehouses, and shops on the southern shore. Heavily fortified to protect against both storms and pirate attacks. Good source for exotic fruits and woods, spices, gemstones (especially turquoise, obsidian, coral, and pearl), whale oil, wool and furs, marble and exotic construction materials, and human and dragonborn slaves, as well as more exotic sorts. Also includes accommodations (inns, taverns, low-end brothels) for travelers).

Connected to the Bazaar District by the Grand Canal. While you can get seafood here, those in the know go outside the city walls to the Tumbles.

During the monsoon, encounters happens on a roll of 1 on a d10 every hour. The rest of the year, they occur on a roll of 1 on a d6 every hour.

ENCOUNTERS (d12)

1. 2d12 Palace Guards searching for something (or someone) missing from the palace. Roll a d6. On a 1-3, they are alone, not terribly serious about the search, and eager for a distraction. On a roll of 4-5, they have a weretiger forced into half-form on a silver chain sniffing down their quarry for them. On a roll of 6, they are being guided by a seer.
2. A selkie disguised as a human or elf. Roll a d4. On a 1-3, it’s searching for a good mate to conceive a child with. On a 4, it’s searching for a lost sibling.
3. Werefox disguised as an exiled elven noblewoman, searching for a suitably talented elven or (if really talented) human woman to serve as her slave/lover/apprentice.
4. Devotees of Xithras, heavily armed and looking for trouble. During the day, they’ll be attempting to discourage the sale and transport of necromantic paraphernalia and transformative magic, especially fertility enhancers like minotaur milk. If encountered at night, they’ll be conducting a clandestine raid on a warehouse or ship, and will be led by a paladin 25% of the time. In either case, they’ll avoid confrontations with city or palace guards, and will not engage in violence with any group that is equal to them or greater in strength.
5. Human barbarians from the west. They’ll be heavily armed and looking for excitement and adventure. They’ll be boisterous, but polite to women and any they perceive as weaker than themselves. However, disparagement of their honor or character (and any negative comments about their mothers) will lead to drawn blades and shed blood.
6. Human barbarians from the east. They’re quiet, seeking as little attention as possible, stick together, and will shrink from open combat. However, they’ll happily murder anyone they see as interfering with their quest (and will even hire Hasheeshins to do the job if they don’t know they’re up to the challenge), and will not hesitate to employ any means they deem necessary for the completion of their mission. They are in the city in order to (d6) 1-2: rescue a kidnapped princess; 3-4: recover a lost scroll; 5: assassinate a wealthy merchant; or 6: steal a powerful magic item.
7. Delegation from one of the Sea Princes. 25% chance they’ll have an escort of Palace Guards. Haughty, rude, expecting to be hated, but eager to capitalize on opportunities for profit.
8. 1d8 sailors on carouse. 1 in 20 chance that one of their fellow carousers is a selkie in disguise of either sex. For every hour the PCs spend with them, there’s a 1-in-6 chance of one of the following happening (d4 + highest CHR bonus):
   

   1 - fist-fight with rival crew.
   2 - knife-fight with rival crew.
   3 - acquire a pinch of dreamblossom snuff (powerful hallucinogen and aphrodisiac, and even a pinch is worth 10 gp).
   4 - PC gifted with a selkie-gold earring (advantage on sight-related rolls once per day).
   5 - PC wins a talking parrot in a game of chance (1-in-10 chance the parrot is a fey in disguise, else 1-in-20 chance it’s an eastern barbarian prince/ess transformed by spell).
   6 - PC wins lifelong friends who will smuggle things/people/PCs out of/into town when the ship is in port (1-in-10 chance any given week, 1-in-20 during monsoons).

9. western barbarian witch hunting a man who owes her (d6) 1-2: 50 sp, 3-4: the skull of an enemy, 5: his soul, or 6: his firstborn.
10. delegation from the merfolk. 2d6 humans (25% they’re actually selkies) plus one merfolk noble being carried in a bowl-like litter filled with seawater born by burly human (10% instead sharkfolk) slaves.
11. 1d6 escaped slaves, looking to smuggle themselves out of town. If returned, they’ll net a reward of 2d6% of their market value.
12. 1d3 agents of the sharkfolk intent on (d6) 1-3: securing protection money from a bold but broke ship’s captain, 4-5: disguised as carousing sailors looking for victims to kidnap and return to the sharkfolk as slaves/food, 6: looking to burn a ship that didn’t pay its protection money.

How Deep Is My Rabbit Hole

This sort of thing rubs me the wrong way. Specifically, this part:

It turns out that if you simply think "hey, there's a village of people here, maybe we can talk to them and figure out what's been going on" then the storyline starts to break considerably, and when the adventuring party starts to make peace treaties with them and get regular intelligence updates, a lot of later "OMG SURPRISE MONSTERS!" moments become less surprising. That's a good illustration of Fucked Up Trope #1: everyone you encounter, if they don't have a Special Plot Helmet, is presumed to be someone you're going to murder and rob, probably in that order.

Ok, by itself, yes, this points out an area where the Temple of Elemental Evil is surprisingly weak (especially compared to Keep on the Borderlands, Vault of the Drow, and especially Shrine of the Kuo-Toa). But that’s not his principal point.

Mr. Zungar’s pointing out the murder-hobos nature of D&D and asks, “Hey, what if we make peace with the hobgoblins instead of attacking them?”

To which I respond, and completely without sarcasm, “By what methods do you make peace with the hobgoblins?”

The hobgoblins are not some misunderstood noble savage, a more pure culture unsullied by contact with “civilization” or the magical brown people de jure. (Though I suppose in Mr. Zungar’s games they could be.) They are a race of slave-owning militarists who consider other sentient beings to be a delicious part of this complete breakfast. They’re medieval Nazis, or Spartans with the humanity filed off. Those who befriend the hobgoblins in the Caves of Chaos are likely to be invited to join them as they feast on plump merchant-and-wife. I don’t have ToEE in front of me right now, but I imagine the hobgoblins there are devotees of Zuggtmoy, demon-goddess of evil (and, one imagines, tasty) fungi. (Seriously, I could totally see Zuggtomy being an Underdark fertility figure, Goddess of the fungal fields, a sort of monstrous Persephone who seduces Hades and robs him of his fecundity in order to feed her legion of followers. Vault of the Drow kinda implies that she, and not Lolth, is the principal deity worshipped by the drow, and that Lolth is an upstart looking to instigate a coup.) In order to befriend the hobgoblins, will the PCs be expected to join the cult? Why not?

I think this is why I find Raggi’s vision of D&D so compelling. It’s a Dashiell Hammett world with swords. These guys might not be so vile as those guys, but nobody’s in the running for the title of actual, unadulterated good guy. It’s vice and greed and brutality and foolishness as far as the eye can see.

But that’s how I play D&D. Mr. Zungar is, of course, welcome to get all post-modern and deconstructive in his games. Others are welcome to go the opposite direction, declaring hobgoblins to be manifestations of the Mythic Underworld, shadows without personality and personhood, and thus “killable” without moral consequences.

Flavor to taste, y'all.

More A5t Via boingboing

Via boingboing, more 5e art, in this case specifically from the Player's Handbook.  Scrolling past the article, we find a red dragon facing off against some heroes by Daren Bader.

My first reaction: the Hildebrandts called and want their color palette back. 

It's ok.  There are bits of it I like, bits of it that kinda remind me of Otis, and the colors and shades and composition and little details all have a pleasantly fairy-tale feel to them.  But it doesn't grip me or get me excited about playing.

I like Tenery's wood elf city much more, in spite of it clearly owing a lot to Peter Jackson's movies and medieval Russian architecture.  Also, the clearly cut-and-pasted elements in it.  In spite of all of that, it has great mood and character.  Looking at this, I can tel you things about the people who live here.  As a player, I'm intrigued and want to explore.  As a DM, I'm inspired and eager to portray the inhabitants of this city to my players.  In short, it does (for me, anyway) exactly what I want art in an RPG to do.  This is especially so when you look at the bigger version at the top of the article. 

WAR's Mordenkainen's Sword is amazing.  I want to play this character and cast this spell against a foe who's been my nemesis for the past three adventures in a final spell-to-spell showdown.  He oozes cool.  He's clearly a bad-ass high-fantasy version of Dr. Strange, Harry Potter grown up and in another universe, an ass-kicker and name-taker supreme.  This piece grips me exactly in the same way that Trampier's  Emirikol the Chaotic did.  If this character doesn't wind up on a lot of character sheets or in campaigns (alas, most likely as a DM PC), I'll eat my hat.  This is Reynolds doing what Reynolds does best.

Then we have Claudio Pozas' Cloudkill.  It kinda looks like a MtG illustration, more so than even Reynold's Mordenkainen's Sword.  I think that's because in Reynold's piece, it's clearly the spell-slinger that's the focus of attention.  Here, it's the cloud. 

I like the details, especially the dwarves that strike me as vaguely Babylonian.  I think a bit too much punch was pulled on what is, in effect, a summoning of mustard gas.  But maybe I've been spoiled by Raggi's art.

I think I'll come to appreciate Scott M. Fischer's High Elf Wizard the more I look at it, but right now I appreciate the pleasant colors and shapes, but as a composition it just doesn't gel for me.  And is it just me, or does she look like she's just tripped and is about to impale herself on the spikey end-caps of her scroll?

As for the warlock page, it looks good: easy to read, easy to find information, pleasing to the eye and complex without feeling cluttered.  I'd have used a bit more sans serif, but they probably get better effect using color.

I've already said I think all there is to say for now about the cover.

All-in-all, I'm pleased.  I think too much emphasis is put on having a unified look in RPGs.  Sure, with some RPGs that have a very strong theme and setting, that can be important.  In a more generic RPG, like D&D, variety is called for.  There's stuff here that leave me feeling very meh about it, but there's also stuff that gets me excited to play.  And I'll bet you there are folks out there who feel exactly the opposite of how I do on the same pieces.  Variety means, sure, some of your pieces won't click with some viewers, but gives you a much better shot at having something that will click with everyone. 

Playing with Kyma - the Bazaar District

The Bazaar District of the port city of Kyma is dominated by docks, warehouses, and shops.  Located on the shore of the Dromosero, the placid inland sea, it's not as heavily fortified as the southern Market District, which services traffic from the Ocean. The Bazaar is the principle source for elven (herbs, silks, dyes, wooden crafted items like musical instruments and furniture, and mead, wines and brandy) and dwarven (worked metal, ingots of adamantium, weapons, vodka, beer, ale) goods, as well as exotic (elven, dwarven, and orcish) slaves. The goods in the bazaar district tend to feel more exotic, though it’s also the principal market for grains, livestock, and lumber as well. Also includes accommodations (inns, taverns, low-end brothels) for travelers, which are dens for smugglers of all sorts. Connected to the Market District by the Grand Canal.

Encounters of note occur on a roll of 1 on a d6 for every hour spent in the district during daylight hours.  The chance for an encounter increases to 1 or 2 on a d6 after sunset and before sunrise.

ENCOUNTERS (d20)

1. 2d6 dwarves on a carouse. They’ve got gold to spend, and hanging out with the dwarves will net you all the free drinks you can stomach (save or pass out from alcohol poisoning every two hours of carousing with them) plus one of the following per hour (d4 + CHR bonus, any number that repeats yields no goodies):
   

   1 - an exquisitely crafted iron brooch worth 150% of the usual value of such an item. It’s unusual fabrication will be recognized by other dwarves and gives a +1 to reaction checks with them.
   2 - a loadstone that always points north.
   3 - a sunstone that will always reveal the position of the sun, no matter how dark the clouds or thick the rain.
   4 - a marriage proposal.
   5 - a bronze puzzle ring that hides within it a complete set of lockpicks.
   6 - a silvered dagger.
   7+ - a treasure map.

2. 3d4 recently unemployed mercenaries, looking for work or, failing that, a fight.
3. a desperate apprentice warlock, sent by his master to acquire a rare and expensive reagent. Alas, the youth’s purse has been stolen, and there’s little he won’t stoop to in order to complete his task.
4. 1d4 masked Hasheeshins ambushing their target.
5. Gang of persistent goblins claiming to sell herbal remedies for nearly all ailments. Roll on Potion Miscibility table for actual results.
6. 2d8 members of a press gang looking to abduct the unwary to serve as oarsmen on a galley.
7. apprentice witch disguised as prostitute seeking (roll a d6: 1) a lock of elven hair, (2-3) the seed of any male, (4-5) a mount for a hag, or (6) a gallon of blood for her mistress.
8. pickpockets! If the PCs get involved in their distraction(roll a d6), the thieves get a bonus on their rolls:
   

   1 - angry crone beating a disobedient youth.
   2 - pair of sailors preparing to fight/duel for the affections of a half-elven girl.
   3 - naked lover being beaten by cuckolded husband while wife pleads for someone to save her lover.
   4 - fire in an old warehouse.
   5 - two gangs of minstrels start a brawl over a stolen song.
   6 - explosion of hallucinogenic gas. Save or be incapacitated for a half-hour with strange visions. Anyone who rolled a 1 on the save has prophetic visions.

9. brawl between the crews of competing ships.
10. slavers claiming to be successful sailors and looking to spend coin on pretty faces. They’ll drug drinks and haul their victims off for sale.
11. procession of elven dignitaries heading to the Palace.
12. dwarves disguised as merchants but really on a mission of vengeance against a merchant who cheated them.
13. City guard raiding a warehouse, dwelling, or other building looking for contraband. 1 in 6 chance the raidees are (roll a second d6: 1-2) orcs, (3-5) heavily armed pirates, or (6) have a warlock or two with them and fight back.
14. 1d4 escaped slaves (1 in 6 chance of being elven) looking to escape the city by boat. If returned to their owner, will garner someone a reward of 1d6% of their market value.
15. 1d4 nixies disguised as elves on the prowl for slaves. They’ll attempt to charm any they can lure into the waters of the sea.
16. 2d4 young adult orcs seeking employment or easy coin so they can purchase weapons.
17. 2d4 orc mercenaries on the carouse. Every hour spent partying with them gains you (1d6+ CHR bonus):
    

    1 - a black eye.
    2 - a blood-sibling who you can call on in dire need, but who may also call on you; refusing the call leads to a blood feud.
    3 - a treasure map.
    4 - being chased by the guard and a night in the gaol if caught.
    5 - fleas.
    6 - a new undercity contact.
    7 - an attempted seduction.
    8+ - an attempted rape.

18. 1d6 elven merchants on a carouse. Every hour spent partying with them results in the entire party (1d4+ best CHR bonus):
    

    1 - losing half your (d6: 1) copper, (2) silver, (3) electrum, (4-5) gold, (6) most expensive piece of jewelry in the party.
    2 - a valuable rumor.
    3 - a chance to buy (d6: 1-3) a rare herb, (4-5) a potent hallucinogen, or (6) a dire poison at 75% the regular price.
    4 - passed out in an opium den. Everyone loses all the coin they had on their person, 1-in-6 chance for each member to have had a prophetic vision.
    5 - an invitation to an orgy.
    6 - a single ring of silver that can be used to gain an audience with an elven noble of a particular house.
    7+ - being drugged, kidnapped, and sold to merfolk.

19. a vampire’s agent, seeking victims.
20. a ghost seeking vengeance.

You've Got a Nothic Thing Coming

WotC has released a sample page of monsters from the Starter Box. Keep in mind that the whole point of the Starter Box is to train budding new DMs. That said, I think there’s both good and bad in what I’m seeing here:

First, the bad: why no picture of the nothic? Maybe it’s on another page? This is clearly a bizarre thing. Does it have working hands? Legs? Or does it move about upon a giant slimy tail, like a slug?

Nothics have traditionally been goofy-looking critters with no more backstory than “humanoid that wants to eat your face and has wacky eye powers.” Clearly, WotC wants to change this, and I love the notion of them being mutated wizards who have peered too long and too deep into the abyss. (Though doesn't that better fit warlocks?  And how, exactly, does one turn into a nothic?  What should PC wizards do to avoid such a fate, and can a foe trick them into it?)

But there’s so much that’s left to the imagination here. Do they have opposable thumbs? What do they want? Do they serve some dark cosmic being, or are they all Gollums-without-rings, lurking about in dark places and going on and on about eating raw fish?

The answers to those questions can be happily campaign or even location-specific, with card-cheat, pants-wearing nothics in one location and feral, face-chewing nothics in another. But there are deeper issues with this description that cripple its utility at the table. How does their Rotting Gaze attack work? Is it a beam that shoots from the eye, and if so, can it be reflected with a mirror? Or does the nothic just manifest wild entropy in the flesh of its target? Or is it some sort of necrotic tear-spray?

In a computer game, the differences are fairly academic. In a tabletop RPG, they’re vital. Knowing something of how the attack works answers questions like:

• can it penetrate magical defenses? Fog? Smoke?
• can one character try to block the attack by leaping between the nothic and its target?
• does the attack damage gear? Can it be used against inanimate objects like doors, ropes, chains, or blindfolds?
• can the PCs harvest it and use it against foes after killing a nothic?

And that’s just what I can come up with off the top of my head about how players will tackle this odd critter. With only the (nearly complete lack of) clues in the description, it’s impossible to guess, which means nothics in one campaign will be fleeing at the sight of mirrors while in others they will be flinging necrotic tears with wild abandon.

Which isn’t that huge an issue in home games but is HUGE in organized play. And I kinda thought WotC wanted organized play to be a big thing now? 

And that all said, the weird insight ability is awesome! Can the nothic search for a secret in particular, or are they random? If the former, they’d make excellent interrogators and (ha-ha) private eyes.

An RPG Company (kinda) Performs Market Research!!!

This "living ruleset" thing looks like the stirrings of a tempest in a tea pot to me.  Quite frankly, it's the least most RPG publishers should do to take the pulse of their audience.  I see no difference between WotC's surveys and what Raggi does (though I suspect Raggi's attempts are more effective).  Neither option is terribly scientific, and both heavily favor those who regularly use the platforms on which the data-collection occurs and enjoy blathering about their own opinions.  (In short, people like me!)

Though now I'm curious if they do anything to collect data via D&D Encounters.  Sure, they collect "results" but do they collect what races and classes are played?  What about spells prepped and cast?  Abilities used?  How long certain fights take?  Solutions attempted in the face of challenges?

On the other hand, how useful would this data be?  There's long been talk about D&D being shaped by organized play in directions that are not terribly friendly to private games. 

At the end of the day, I'm happy to see folks performing any sort of market research on RPGs.   After decades of stupid and incorrect "conventional wisdom" (Box sets killed TSR!  Adventures are loss-leaders, necessary but a drain on publishers!) it's nice to see folks actually taking the time to find out what gamers actually think and want and use and buy. 

Right now, within easy reach of me, are the core dead-tree resources I use regularly in my weekly games: Moldvay's Basic, Cook's Expert, Vornheim, and 2e's Al-Qadim book (primarily for the equipment lists) and Monstrous Manual.  It's not a collection I think any market strategy team would ever devise.  It is, however, a collection of book-types that have served me very well over the years: basic rulebooks, a monster book, and a book of gear and services PCs should be able to purchase whenever they've returned to civilization.  Vornheim mostly gets used for generating NPCs and for its wonderful searching-a-library rules (among other odd bits in it).  The 1e DMG isn't at hand, but I pull it out when doing prep work.

This collection hasn't changed much since 1990.  Back then, the Moldvay/Cook books were replaced by the 2e PHB.  The Al-Qadim book was replaced by the Arms & Equipment Guide and Arora's Whole Realms Catalogue.  The Monstrous Manual was heavily supplemented with 1e's MM and MM2, largely for the demons, devils, daemons, and modrons, all of whom made regularly appearances in my college game.

I bring this up to speak of the limits of the sort of market research I see WotC performing.  They're looking backward: what did we do right and what did we do wrong?  A stronger focus on utility would probably serve them better, but they need to take a broad view of utility.  I replaced two books narrowly focused on my need (the Arms & Equipment Guide and Arora's) and replaced them with a book that, ostensibly, has little or nothing to do with that need (Al-Qadim).  Utility has nothing to do with what's on the cover and everything to do with what's inside and what can and does get used at the table.

How do you capture that data?  Maybe by asking DMs to take snapshots of their gaming table at the end of the game so you can see what books and resources are there, having been used.    

DMG as Hackers Guide for 5e D&D

From an interview with Mike Mearls over at the Escapist:

Mearls: The DMG is, well - going back to Basic D&D as a starting point - if you think of the Player's Handbook as for the player who is looking at character classes and played a couple of them and wants more options or wants to fine-tune what their character is, or who says "I want to play a paladin." The DMG serves the same role for the DM. Basic D&D hits core fantasy, it's stereotypical fantasy adventuring. If you're the DM and you want to do something more exotic, you say "I want to add technology to my game" or "I want to have more detailed rules for a grim and grittier game, more of a horror game." That's where the DMG comes in, it's for really fine-tuning your campaign, and creating a different type of experience than your standard fantasy campaign. It's also for expanding the scope of the game. So we've talked about things like ruling a domain or things like that. The more detailed rules for that would be in the DMG. We've talked about having some basic rules for things like that in Basic D&D but we're not 100% into it either way - is it confusing to new players or is it nice that it gives them a clear progression? We're still not quite decided on that yet. It's for if you want more depth on specific topics.

The DMG also has a lot of utilities in it, like for dungeon creation, adventure creation, creating monsters, creating spells, even if you wanted to create a character class. It's not quite the point-buy system from 2nd Edition, but it does say things like "Well if you want to create a class for your campaign then here's a good way to approach it."

So it's really for getting under the hood of how the system works and building up your campaign.

Bolding: So really, besides maybe Unearthed Arcana, there's never really been a hacker's guide, as it were, for D&D.

Mearls: No, exactly. And that's what we were inspired by. People like to tinker with their campaigns, and especially if you've been DMing for a while and you kind of want to do something different. Really going into in-depth [changes]. And now, it's not going to be deconstructing everything, but it's giving you the tools you need to make your own changes. And there's always going to be art to it, like monster creation, we can't give you a formula that's perfect. What do you do with a monster that has one hit point, one AC, and can cast harm once per day? How do you balance that? There's no simple answer, but even just telling DMs that helps.

I'm actually pretty happy to see this.  Others may disagree with me, but I've found the advice for DMs in post-Gygax-era D&D to be of questionable value.  ("Here's some problem players you may run into and some passive-aggressive methods for dealing with them, since expecting you to act like adults never occurred to us!")  Getting at what the rules are trying to do and how tinkering with them might affect things would have been great advice back at the beginning.  Having these sorts of assumptions and ideals spelled out in advance will give new DMs a leg-up on understanding what the game's about and what they'll need to do to make it be about something else.

EN World Interviews Monte Cook and Shanna Germain

In which we learn that gaming is rising in popularity among 30-something women, D&D nearly didn't survive the '90s, and OD&D is utterly lacking in a resolution mechanic.

• How D&D nearly didn't survive the '90s and (some of) the thinking behind the OGL @ 10 mins & 17 mins.
• Thoughts on Kickstarter and how it's changing the RPG industry and landscape @ 35 mins.
• OD&D and what the early years of RPGs were like @ 43 mins.  

Lots of good stuff here, worth a listen though you don't necessarily need to watch it.  So perfect for doing the dishes or as a break from your usual podcast feed.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Not sure if this would be hella cool or just annoying.

An OGL for 5e

So, assuming WotC decides they want an OGL of some flavor for 5e, what should it look like?

The original OGL was intended to encourage DMs to publish their adventures. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that adventures were necessary to support an RPG, but in general cost more to make than they brought in. As with “box sets killed TSR” it was part of the conventional wisdom that turned out to be untrue as Paizo and James Edward Raggi IV proved, both building empires on a foundation of adventures.

Granted, the OGL and d20 license didn't work as planned. Instead, they resulted in a rash of splatbooks. If WotC is lucky, they'll get that again with 5e.

It's pretty obvious that WotC is following Paizo's lead with their linked adventure “storylines” like Tyranny of Dragons. They want to continuously publish entire campaigns worth of adventures, teased and supported by their weekly play Encounters program. And they want to keep the barriers to entry into the game low, hence the free-to-download Basic D&D PDF.

And because of that, they need to avoid 4e's new-hardback-every-month policy like the plague. It didn't take long for that to result in needing software to actually generate a character. Keep that sort of nonsense up, and D&D will lose its status as gateway product into the hobby.

(In comparison, notice how Paizo, in the 6 years they've been doing the Pathfinder thing, have only released two additional books of character classes. Frankly, even that may be a bit fast; it'll be interesting to see how far they can ride this train. Conventional wisdom says that they'll need a reboot via a new edition in the next two years, but Paizo's made their money by bucking the conventional wisdom.)

Letting third party publishers generate extra character classes and feats and all of that would allow WotC to keep the core of the game simple and approachable, but still have the variety people will start to desire once the new has worn off.

That said, I do agree with Mythmere that sooner is probably better than later. After all, part of the appeal of 5e is that it's back to being the sort of game we all know and love. So some of us are going to want some sexy newness or oddness right out of the gate.

Which is why I disagree with Matt Finch. The whole purpose of “open sourcing” is to invite variety and adaptability. If the goal is to get as many people as possible playing D&D, then they want a 5e version of Carcosa and they want Zak's nephilidian vampires and Aos' sci-fantasy Metal Earth and Jeff's rule-of-cool Saturday-morning-cartoon fueled insanities.

Because that sort of stuff is where enthusiasm and excitement come from. Because that makes D&D more than just Middle Earth with the serial numbers filed off. WotC can handle Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance just fine. But while they want a 5e Death Frost Doom, the last thing they want is to actually publish it themselves. Letting others do that via an OGL gives them the best of both worlds: edgy and exciting content AND plausible deniability. D&D can be “dangerous” and cool (and weird and silly and steampunky and sci-fi and...) without WotC needing to actually dilute their core product by publishing it.

More importantly, it would allow for a plethora of splat books with variant character classes, spells and magic systems, skills, and whatnot. Again, WotC gets the best of both worlds: the 3rd party splatbooks give D&D the variety experienced players crave, but since they are 3rd party, the game doesn't get buried under a mountain of official material that makes it increasingly harder for new players to join in on the fun.

This would free up WotC to focus on setting material and adventure “storylines,” and the supplemental material players want to make the most of playing in them. It also allows them to focus more heavily on profitable “side projects” like Lords of Waterdeep and novels which grow and strengthen the IP.

The No-news on the 5e OGL

Mr. Mearls' Legends & Lore blog continues to be the place for breaking news about 5e. Only, in this case, the news is nothing will break before autumn, and nothing will actually be happening until 2015 sometime.

The official reason given is quality control; they want folks to have the DMG in hand and time “to absorb the rules and how they all interact.” That seems a bit odd to me, considering the open beta testing period and online discussions about the rules organized by Mearls & Co.

So, being the suspicious git that I am, I suspect that WotC really doesn't know what they want from an OGL at this point. On the one hand, everyone expects them to have something, and they may actually feel they could benefit from one. On the other hand, they want to take the time to do it right because doing it wrong last time allowed the worst thing possible to happen: Paizo's Pathfinder RPG.

Make no mistake, WotC's fumbling about with an OGL for 4th edition is entirely responsible for the creation of the Pathfinder game. They should have been bending over backwards to get Paizo on-board with 4e. Instead, WotC left them dangling in the wind and forced them to remain with the 3.x OGL. It could have been, and should have been, handled differently.

So the big question is, does WotC understand this? It'd be easy enough to blame the whole situation on the mere existence of the 3.x OGL. After all, without that, Paizo wouldn't have been able to scoop up all those players who didn't want to migrate to 4e.

I think that's missing the point, however. After all, nobody's talking about True20, or Hackmaster, or Dungeon Crawl Classics, or Castles & Crusades, or even all of them combined threatening D&D's dominance of the market. The real threat is Paizo. And that's because Paizo has something that WotC lacks: an effective marketing juggernaut.

People know about Pathfinder, people are excited about Pathfinder, people love showing off their Pathfinder stuff. Pathfinder is bright and shiny. Paizo is seen as friendly and excited about gaming and eager to promote new talent and neat ideas. Paizo oozes cool; people may doubt whether or not they'll like Paizo's next adventure path, or think that Golarion is too generic or mish-mashy, or worry they're putting out too many hardcover rulebooks, but nobody doubts that the next things coming from Paizo will resonate. They will look cool, they will feel cool, and lots of people will be interested in reading them.

Paizo's tapped the same lightning that Games Workshop has held bottled for so long now. Sure, there are other games out there, but Warhammer and Warhammer 40k are the ones that fire imaginations and induce passionate obsessions (both pro and anti, as we also see with Pathfinder). In both cases, the rules barely factor into things. In both cases, the aesthetics created by the companies are gripping and inspiring and enticing.

And that's what WotC needs to worry about. They should fear looking like also-rans, which is why the discussion of their covers does matter. They wallowed for six years in the New Coke debacle that was 4e marketing and trade dress.

5e is a chance for WotC to start over with D&D and it certainly looks like they're taking. A strong and focused OGL would be another potent arrow in their quiver, so I can absolutely understand them taking their time in crafting one.

Cover A5t Update

So this weekend I was at Comicpalooza. So was David Petersen and I was lucky enough to see him give an artist a very in-depth and detailed review of her portfolio. Among the things he mentioned was the dangers of making an image bigger. If you've ever taken a computer graphic that looked great on the screen and tried to blow it up to be a massive poster on your wall, you know the troubles he was speaking of: sharp lines become blurred (or even pixelated), details grow fuzzy, definition is destroyed.

I'm wondering how much of this we're seeing in the 5e covers? Apparently, this is the full picture Tyler Jacobson created for the PHB:

I gotta admit, as an image, I like this (even if it does look like the giant's been cut off at the knees). It's got action and scenery and reveals a lot of imagination. I love the hellhounds chained beside the throne and the dragon wing hanging from the giant's fancy hat.

I still don't like the crop they made for the cover, though. And blowing up the image like that didn't do anyone any favors.

Someone (Stuart Robertson? I can't find who now.) commented about the bad crop jobs done on these covers, how they're too close, cutting out interesting details and reducing important figures to illogical bits. Seeing the full version of the PHB, I can only agree.

I'm still not a fan of the art for the DMG. It's neat, but really doesn't knock my socks off. Apparently, the liche is raising the recently deceased to join it's legions of undead. Neat idea, but I think I'm just not on the same page as the artist when it comes to motivating DMs:

The lich is extremely powerful and we wanted the DMs out there to get excited about wielding that power. From my angle, I wanted the lich to be looming over the viewer and seem unstoppable as he raised the corpses around him. Heroes that just fell in an attempt to destroy him are now working for him. Very demoralizing.

The First Hit is 5ree!

Today we learn that Basic D&D will be a free PDF. We'll get the basic four classes (fighter, wizard, rogue, and cleric) up to level 20 and the basic four races (human, elf, dwarf, and halfling). The analogy drawn is between Rules Cyclopedia and AD&D. I'm not entirely sure how well that analogy holds up (TSR made a big deal back-in-the-day about D&D and AD&D being completely different games), but it does make it fairly clear where their thinking is.

This isn't, of course, exactly unheard of. LotFP has had their rules available for free for years now. So are the rules for Pathfinder, via the SRD. Skirmisher's Bookforge project is largely tentpoled by free rules.

I suspect Basic D&D will be different in that it'll be a much prettier thing. It will include art and layout and such optimized for an electronic document. If WotC is serious about this thing, it should also include a basic character generator that will walk you through the process and give you a character sheet you can print out at the end of it. It should also come with a basic dice-roller for folks who've downloaded the game but don't have a local store to get dice TODAY! I doubt they're that serious about it, alas, and we'll just end up with a basic PDF that might include bookmarks and have lots of pretty art in it.

Of more interest to me is how this turns the conventional wisdom, well, not quite on its head. WotC is still planning to sell big, expensive coffee-table books (though those who claim they'll never play the game due to the expense have just had the rug pulled out from under them in an amusing way by Wot€) and I suspect the sale of those books is considered the backbone of their income strategy. The loss-leader is now a bit more out-and-up-front for them. After all, while many RPG publishers do offer free PDFs of their rules, they don't treat those PDFs as “product” in their own right. This is WotC making a big production of the loss-leader, which, honestly, is how you're supposed to do it. If it doesn't come with a lot of how-to advice and a holding-the-first-time-DM's-hand starter adventure, I'll be disappointed.

Not surprised, mind you, just disappointed. After all, an RPG loss-leader should leave everyone hungry for more, and the best way to do that is to get them to roll up characters and play them. A solo-adventure followed by a beginner-DM-friendly adventure that's also really cool would seem the obvious ways to go.

What also would be cool? A collection of head-shots to use as character portraits, sure, (and WotC certainly has access to a large collection of that sort of thing) but what would make people getting this PDF really want to play it RIGHT NOW? What could they do to make sure that first experience was so cool that nobody can wait to do it again? I think the focus should be on that first adventure, and it should include printable maps and fold-over minis, art the DM can pull up on a screen to show the players during the adventure (like the cut-out pictures from Tomb of Horrors), and LOTS of good advice about how to run and build fun adventures.

But that's just me off the top of my head. Coming up with ideas like this isn't my 9-to-5, nor do I have access to WotC's playtester feedback and marketing research. They ought to be brainstorming on this question like mad. Or, rather, they should have been doing that when they started the Basic D&D project. So far, they haven't said anything that leads me to believe that this will be a stand-out, knock-our-socks-off product. But then, we're only just now hearing about it, so who knows what else they may have up their sleeves?

Parlez-vous Melnibonéan?

From France, the land of epic comic books, comes this:

Industry! (Hunh!) What is it Good For? (Part the Second)

Among other things, giving us (the consumers) the benefits of bulk discounts:

Approaching the Last Two Days for the Simple System Kickstarter

The Simple System is in its last 50 hours of Kickstarting as I write this.  This is the RPG with the card-based resolution system I blogged about last week.  Mr. Matthews is also looking for feedback on design changes he's experimenting with to make the cards easier to read for those who are colorblind.  I know a number of my readers know a think or two about graphical design; please stop by and give him your two cents.

Thanks!

Cover A5t

Oh.

Um.

Oh dear?

Ok, it's not that bad. But it does like rather generic. I mean, these look like, hey, look, another fantasy RPG. Nothing exciting here.

Granted, part of that is how front-and-center the art is, with the titles very minimized. They're almost not there. I want to click or swipe to make them woosh off the screen. That's not a bad thing.

It would be a better thing if the art was knock-my-socks off.

Anyone have any idea who made these? I'm about to horribly insult them, whoever they are.

First off, the good: they all clearly belong to the same product line. No confusion there. I'm not entirely certain they are all the work of the same person (the lighting and textures for the MM and DMG are very different, and there's a subtly muted, almost simplified feel to the colors and textures of the starter set). If that's the case, the art direction is all the more impressive for it.

The cover for Hoard of the Dragon Queen is fun: shiny dragon, cool (ha-ha) attack, neat use of color to highlight the action. My favorite of the bunch.

But I'm seeing nothing here I'd want to put on my wall, and absolutely nothing that makes these leap off the shelves.

The MM has the most painterly look to it. It reminds me a bit of WAR's work, but with much less character. In fact, it almost looks like it was fashioned from cut-and-pasted elements. Haven't we seen that exact pose of a beholder before? Is that a dwarf from an interior 4e illustration? What's up with the screaming, turbaned person of indeterminate gender? Are they in the same picture? Do they know there's a beholder behind them? And why is that statue spitting lightning bolts? Or is it getting hit in the face with lightining bolts? And why is there a staircase to nowhere in the background? Seriously, it's a jumble of elements which aren't really interacting with each other.

The rest have this odd, overly sharp 3d feel to them, as if they started as poser art and then were hit with oil-painting filters in Photoshop. The teeth of the green dragon, the hands of the giant, all have this oddly sharp feel to them even though, as you look closely, you can see the brush strokes and other artifacts of painted work. It's very odd.

And the DMG, I'm sorry to say, has the look of poser art from a distance: the electric glow that washes out all other colors, the plastic-looking skin, the shadows. A second, closer look reveals the painterly techniques, but...

And what, exactly, is going on in this picture? Is he animating a corpse? Killing a dude? And is it just me, or does the liche's amulet (clearly a shout-out to the Green Devil-face) look like it was added in later?

One thing that does jump out is the central place of the monsters. The heroes barely fit in the frame, clearly playing second-fiddle to the monsters, each of which commands center stage. I'm curious to see how far we've moved away from the character-centered art of late 3.x and nearly all of 4.x. In none of these pics do I recognize a hero who's doing something really cool. Maybe the Viking sorceress on the cover the PHB, but it's hard to make out any details on her. Dress her in something other than her furs and I'm not sure I'd recognize her. Ditto for the elven-warrior-of-indeterminate-gender who's with her  All-in-all, the giant on the PHB, with his awesome white-dragon-pelt hat is the coolest character in the bunch.

(So is the difficulty of assigning gender to the figures part of WotC's way of foiling the folks who count and comment on that sort of thing? Or an artifact of conscious effort to make the heroes cyphers upon which the viewer can project their preferences, rather like the art in the old Choose Your Own Adventure Books?)

The covers for 3e were daring, unique, and put you in the world of D&D; you, the player, were holding artifact tomes from magical realms of lore and adventure. The 4e covers were clearly attempting to ride the zeitgeist with their comic-esque, uber-cool figures.

These 5e covers do not look like the flagship products of an industry or a hobby. These look plain, almost timid. They look like the work of, well, hobbyists throwing things together in their spare time, with only a modicum of design knowledge gleaned from Google-found top-five lists. Seriously, how are these very meh covers supposed to share shelf space with the likes of these:

 It's official: so far as production values go, WotC is getting their behind handed to them by a guy in Finland working out of his living room (NSFW!).

Addendum: I haven't been as clear as I should be when I describe the art as "generic."  What I mean is, this doesn't look special or noteworthy or of greater renown or quality.  That's what I mean by "generic" here.  Not so much that this is a game based on standard tropes of fantasy gaming, but rather that these are nothing to get excited about. These do not look like the flagship products of fantasy RPGing. They look like just more in a sea of interchangeable products. Nothing here says, "This is D-and-motherfucking-D, the 500 lbs gorilla of RPGs, the game that started it all, the standard by which all others should be judged." Walking into my local gaming stores with no real knowledge of the hobby, I'd be just as likely to pick up Dragon Age or DCCC as these, just based on the covers, and far more likely to grab Pathfinder, ACKS, or RuneQuest (all of which I can find at local gaming shops in town).

Addendum the Second:  via Walser's Raging Owlbear, a mock up by Stuart Robertson that is, if nothing else, a lot more fun than the ones WotC chose to go with.  I'm not entirely sure I prefer the heavier trade dress he uses to the minimalist choices of WotC, but I can see why folks both prefer and expect that sort of thing.  And, as Robertson points out, WotC already has access to (and has been using to promote 5e) art that is more fun and more powerful than the choices they decided to go with.

In Which Trollsmyth Blegs for More!

While I'm busy dusting the shelves and knocking away the cobwebs here in my online home, I can't help but see that the blog roll needs some serious work.  A lot of those links don't actually go anywhere anymore, and some blogs haven't been updated in years.  So, time to fix that.

If you know of any blogs that really belong there, please drop me a note either via email or in a comment below.

Thanks!

Simple System: Heartbreaker for a New Generation

There’s a lot of stuff I like about Derek Matthews’ Simple System tabletop RPG. Mr. Matthews has clearly been hanging around “the community” (or, at the very least, Big Purple) and reading lots of game design theory. The result is a game that plays with some nice mechanical differences at the table.

The most obvious difference is using cards instead of dice. I’ve read quite a bit about how well using plain old playing cards works for initiative, since you can see right on the card who is next, which is why Savage Worlds uses them. Playing cards are also very easy to read, even from across the table.

Mr. Matthews takes this a step further by creating custom cards that include a lot more information than you can gather from suit and number. By making his cards square and putting a different “number” along each edge, he’s allowed a single card to provide results for four different difficulty levels. A second, more inner ring of “pips” offers additional numbers (primarily used for weapon damage and armour damage-blocking). The center of the card is dominated by a teardrop direction indicator surrounding a larger number whose primary purpose is initiative. In short, each card is packed with data that can be used in a number of ways and can be read fairly easily from across the table due to the bright colors chosen (though I’m a bit surprised about the repetition of colors; green and red are used both for results and as background colors which, I would think, would make reading the cards slightly more difficulty than necessary).

Another clever piece of design I’ve read about, but can’t remember actually seeing in practice before, is rewarding players directly for invoking flaws at the moment the flaws come up in play. When creating a character in the Simple System, you can have one skill for each flaw you give your character. When your flaw is invoked in the game, you get a hero card which can be used for “rerolls”, one-use buffs, as extra hit points, or turned in at the end of the adventure as experience points for leveling-up purposes. So instead of having to weigh and value such flaws in a vacuum, players can be encouraged to come up with whatever flaws they like; they only get rewarded for those character flaws that actually come up in the game.

(So far, the only mechanism Mr. Matthews has mentioned for acquiring hero cards is the invocation of flaws and the awarding of three cards at the beginning of each adventure. I imagine there will also be ways to earn hero cards by successfully completing adventures. If the invocation of flaws is the principal method for earning most of your hero cards, then Simple System games are largely about characters getting into trouble. That sounds, to me, like a recipe for very fun games.)

Beyond these innovations, Simple System looks like pretty much every generic RPG you’ve played before: six stats that map nearly perfectly onto D&D’s original six, more complex and detailed rules for combat, and a strong focus on gear (though as the rules stand now, it does appear that stats are the most important thing on your character sheet, with skills and equipment offering bonuses or dictating results). The game also encourages the use of miniatures and maps. While that encouragement isn’t maybe as strong as 3.x D&D’s, you can absolutely see how Simple System is going to feel very familiar to players of Type III D&D.

In fact, it’s easy to see Simple System as a reaction to 3.x’s failings. The focus on simplicity, the “~30 page rulebook,” being able to create a character in “5 minutes or less,” having everything you need to know about your character’s gear and powers printed on cards right there in your hands, and the eschewing of diagonal movement, all look like reactions against 3.x’s greatest sins. There’ll be no flipping through 200 page tomes looking for the exact wording of a rule or spending hours crafting your character’s development path.

It does appear to be similar to Type III D&D in that it assumes a lot of prep-work ahead of time, mostly in the form of preparing handouts (in this case equipment and antagonist cards in addition to gridded maps for the miniatures). There’s no reason you couldn’t play with all that stuff, of course, but the default is clearly prepared adventures with a focus on combat encounters.

That said, Simple System is, well, simple. And RPGs with simple rules just beg for houseruling. With today’s ubiquitous printing and production facilities, I suspect house-ruling and house-printing cards will be a common thing.

I’ve yet to get my hands on this one, but from what I’ve seen, I like it. If I were to run an RPG set in the 40k universe, Simple System’s miniature rules would be a nice nod towards the wargame elements without turning the session into a wargame. The card-flipping mechanic looks nice and quick, the math is negligible, and with all the rules for powers and gear printed on cards players have at the table in front of them, I suspect Simple System games will move at brisk clip, especially compared to more rules-heavy systems like WotC-era D&D or even Savage Worlds. It might even give Fate a run for its money in the speed department. Tailoring the cards for your particular campaign might even give a new shot in the arm to really bizarre settings, making the aesthetic elements more present at the table. I certainly hope we see more of the Simple System, and I hope it inspires others to stretch even further outside the box.