Now that the news has sunk in for me, I welcome it. Fourth Edition has its advantages, but it is not without faults, as I have written before. Although I’m annoyed at yet another opportunity to throw out a stack of books and spend a hundred bucks on new ones, I’ve come to regard 4E as the Windows Vista of D&D. Once it’s gone, I think most people will be glad to forget about it.

There is not much information yet about what 5E is going to look like. It was only announced yesterday, for crying out loud. Probably the best source for news related to the new edition is EN World, specifically, their D&D Next page.

Partly out of professional interest as a semi-pro game designer, and partly because I have an active, regular game getting started, I expect I’ll follow the development of this edition more closely than I did for Fourth, and will probably buy and read the books a lot sooner this time around. For now, I’ll just start by reacting to some of the information we do have.

Hope Springs Eternal

I am still at the point where I greet news of a new D&D edition with optimism. I keep thinking, “great, another chance for Wizards of the Coast to finally get it right!” Some may consider that reaction uncharitable, but it’s better than what I bet many of WotC’s other customers are saying.

Some of the words coming out of WotC are encouraging. For example,

“The goal of this project is to develop a universal rules system that takes from the best of every edition and gets at the soul of what D&D is.”

–Mike Mearls, Wizards of the Coast

“Get[ting] at the soul of what D&D is” sounds to me like code for taking a step back from the World of Warcraft influence that’s so apparent in 4E. So that’s good.

I’m a bit more skeptical about the idea of a “universal rules system” — as a designer, I’ve come to believe that the rules of a role-playing game have to be designed to support the concepts and atmosphere the game wants to promote. That’s why Ars Magica has incredibly flexible and robust magic rules, but its combat system is pretty clunky and straightforward; why Call of Cthulhu has pages and pages of rules for how your character can go insane; and so on. A truly generic rules system can’t evoke the unique moods of those games. But that’s not what I think Wizards of the Coast means in this context. While no game system can be all things to everyone, I do think it’s possible for designers to get a grip on the essence of D&D and set down a rule system that captures that essence. It would be “universal” in the sense that, if done right, it should appeal to everyone who likes that essence of D&D.

The Strengths of Each Edition

Mr. Mearls’ stated goal is to “[take] the best from each edition.” I am actually old enough to have read and played each edition of D&D, so here I’ll offer my completely subjective opinion of what was best about each edition.

Fourth Edition: Tactical Options

The real strength of Fourth Edition is that every round, the players always have choices. This is a big deal, and having played Fourth Edition I do not think I would want to go back. Every class has powers it can use at will and every character has more than one of those powers. Having those choices makes the combat portion of the game a lot more fun.

I keep feeling the urge to qualify my praise of Fourth Edition by pointing out its faults, but I’ll resist. Giving players a choice of powers was a revolutionary improvement that drove my choice to adopt it as the edition for my game.

Fourth Edition does a great job of minimizing “down time” and getting the players back into the action. It threw away the concept of Vancian magic (based on the fantasy novels of Jack Vance, which I’ve never read) where wizards “forget” their spells after casting them, with great success. Instead of the spellcasters spending 10 or 20 minutes every couple of hours figuring out what spells to prepare for the day, everyone just heals up and gets going. This means, quite simply, more time for fun at the gaming table.

Another nice thing about Fourth Edition in my opinion is that as characters rise in level, they get better at everything: a character’s level figures into his Armor Class, skill checks, and so on. If D&D is to remain a level-based system, as I think practically everyone expects it should, it’s nice for the character’s level to mean something.

Third Edition: Character Options

Third Edition in my opinion had many strengths, the greatest of which was probably the many possible directions in which to develop a character. At every level, characters get new skill points to spend and usually a new feat or class feature. Multi-classing was available to any character and the rules for it were straightforward and logical. More so than other editions, in Third Edition it was easy to visualize your character’s concept and realize it in mechanical terms. If you wanted an armor-clad dwarf warrior who dabbles in magic and can cast spells in full plate, you could make it. A fighter specialized in the quarterstaff and expert at disarming foes? No problem. More so than other editions, Third Edition was a canvas for the players’ imaginations.

Another of Third Edition’s great strengths was the Open Game License. I think the experiment with open-source roleplaying rules was a roaring success that helped to revitalize the industry. I also think that Wizards’ decision to turn its back on openness is a big factor in the failure of Fourth Edition (that’s right, I said “failure.”) Let’s hope they learn the right lessons from history.

Second Edition: Evolution, not Revolution

Second Edition made a lot of improvements over First Edition. The strength of the edition was that it took a lot of the great ideas from First Edition and made them more systematic and better balanced. A skill system made its first appearance, though it was called by the awkward moniker “nonweapon proficiencies” (a name that rather plainly illustrates the design bias toward combat that is integral to D&D’s legacy). Dragons became tough, instead of being the paper tigers they were in First Edition. In general, Second Edition was better balanced and a good deal easier to play — though it still showed lots of room for improvement.

Second Edition was also when the Forgotten Realms setting really took off. I have never gotten really excited about published game settings — my impulse to create my own is too strong — but a lot of gamers I know, some of whom have excellent taste, love the Realms. If I had to point to a major strength of Second Edition, I think it would be the setting more than the rules.

First Edition: Putting “Advanced” in Dungeons and Dragons!

First Edition AD&D had issues. The rules were complicated and totally arbitrary. At first I was a bit hesitant to name one thing that was really great about First Edition, but then I thought back on the experience of playing that edition. The choice became obvious: the Dungeon Master’s Guide. That book was awesome! Hundreds of pages of dense, small print, with rules and advice on all manner of idiosyncratic topics, it was an opus of amazing breadth. Gary Gygax’s authoritative and unabashedly geeky voice leapt from topic to topic with the energy of a hummingbird, covering subjects as quirky and arcane as the cost to install a new machicolations in your castle to what happens if you mix two magic potions together (the famous Potion Miscibility Table) to what creatures one would encounter in the Pleistocene Epoch to how likely a character is to contract parasites (the Parasitic Infestation Table: I remember it fondly). A lot of the material was, let’s say, “peripheral,” but it suggested so many possibilities. The book was both inspired and inspiring; it was a very far cry from the commercialized, color-illustrated, and basically vacuous content of all later editions of the DM’s Guide. Sure, Gygax’s prose impressed me a lot more when I was ten than it probably would now that I’m past forty (I don’t want to look back at it and spoil the memory). If a new edition of D&D can capture a quarter of the enthusiasm of that seminal work of role-playing, I will gladly embrace it and buy copies for my friends.

Basic, Expert, and All That

I never really played a lot of the non-Advanced version of D&D: I had the blue-book version of Basic D&D but moved on to Advanced long before the Expert boxed set was published. There is something to be said for Basic D&D (and the later Rules Cyclopedia), though: imagine a version of D&D where all the rules fit into one book, and you can get started playing for under $50. I think it would be great if the next version of D&D had a simple, low-cost way to get started with the basics. Given that tabletop gaming today faces fierce competition from video games and MMO’s as well as collectible-card games, it seems like a good idea to lower the amount of money, time, and commitment it takes to play D&D for the first time.

Original D&D: Classic Dungeon Crawling

In comparison to Third and Fourth Editions, the original tan books do not look like much. The mechanics were certainly a diamond in the rough, to put it politely. I think the original version of Dungeons and Dragons had a couple of things going for it, though, that the designers of the next edition would do well to consider. First, it was meant to be a starting point, not a comprehensive set of rules to cover all possible situations. Dungeon Masters were expected to add their own monsters and treasures and to make up rules on the fly. A bit of that spirit would be a refreshing change from 4E in particular, where the publisher tries to spoon-feed every new idea to the players and the game seems engineered to discourage innovation. Related to this is the fact that in the early days, D&D encouraged at least a few third-party publishers. Judges’ Guild produced some high-quality supplements, including the famous City State of the Invincible Overlord.

In short, the strengths of the original tan booklets of D&D, aside from the fact that they basically pioneered role-playing games and revolutionized popular culture, were that they were simple, open, and extensible. It would be great if the next D&D could say the same.

Lately I’ve been playing two tabletop RPGs, which partially accounts for the lack of blog posts in about three months. One of my games is, of course, Ars Magica, and the other is the (relatively) new Space 1889: Rad Sands setting for Savage Worlds.

I find that over the past three or four years my tastes in gaming have changed quite a bit. I still love Ars Magica of course, but (as I’ve written previously) increasingly I am interested in games where the rules stay out of the way and the players can focus on the story and on role-playing. So Savage Worlds, with its lightweight core rule book (paperback, 160 pages, $9.95 retail), was just the thing to try.

Overall I am very satisfied with the Savage Worlds system. It’s lean, straightforward, and includes features, such as Edges and Hindrances for characters, that encourage role-playing. Character creation was pretty quick and I was able to get my new group of five players to create characters and learn the basics within a couple of hours.

So why is it that, now four sessions into this game, we are still tripping over the combat system?

Simple Does Not Mean Easy

The Savage Worlds rules take a pretty minimalistic approach to resolving most tasks: your character sheet tells you what kind of die you get to roll, you roll it, and if you get a 4 or better, you succeed. If you get an 8 or better, you succeed extra well, and so on. I think the rule book only spends about twice as many words as that to describe the basic mechanics.

As with most games, combat gets its own chapter. Players expect this. Frankly if you are going to use combat rules at all then I expect those rules to cover the many common contingencies one might run into, such as using improvised weapons or trying to fight in the dark. Satisfying that expectation pretty much means that the combat rules are a beefy chapter in that skinny rule book. This is all well and good. The funny thing is, we weren’t using the various esoteric options, hanging upside down from a cliff edge while firing full auto at a moving target and such. We were pretty much running vanilla melees and firefights.

I decided to create a flow chart to help myself and my players learn the decisions involved when playing a battle. It turns out, there are a lot of them! This chart basically covers a single attack, which every player makes every turn, and it’s simplified — most of the optional rules like called shots and so forth are left off. They wouldn’t fit.

Now that I have the chart in front of me, I see why we were having trouble. More so than other games, there are a lot of decisions that get made every round. Now from a playability point of view, decisions are fun. Individually those decisions are all pretty simple. They’re straightforward and quick to make. What takes a bit longer is getting a handle on how those decisions feed into one another and what happens next after the outcome of an earlier die roll. I think this flowchart is really going to help us.

It would be an interesting exercise to make a similar chart for another game, like D&D. But for D&D (Fourth Edition at least) the chart would have to be very abstract, something like “decide what power to use, find your DC, make your attack, modify your roll up the wazoo, and then if it worked read the effects of your power to see what happens.” And when you boil it down to those terms, D&D combat sounds pretty boring: endless variations on the same theme. That is of course less than half the story, because deciding what power to use at a given moment (based on the details of how it works) is where the fun of D&D lies.

So both Savage Worlds and D&D have fun combat systems but they approach it in totally different ways. D&D has a simple pattern that players can re-use in endless variations of different powers; Savage Worlds has a more complex system with lots of little decisions here and there that add up to a deceptively large amount of player control. But I do have to say, D&D combat is easier to learn.

SavageWorldsCombatFlowChart.pdf

SavageWorldsCombatFlowChart.odg

The trouble with Windows Search is that it can only search certain kinds of documents. Not too long ago I spent more money than I care to admit on a bunch of PDFs for Ars Magica; I already owned most of those books in hard copy but the corpus of material for that game has grown so large, and is scattered across so many books, that I don’t have the time or the patience to flip through all the possible books that might contain an obscure rule. (This is compounded by the publisher’s choice not to include an index in most of the recent books, but that’s another rant.) I thought that with the electronic rule books, that problem would be solved. Imagine my disappointment when I typed “magus” (the word for wizards in Ars Magica) and got no results!

It turns out, Windows Search doesn’t work on PDF documents, only MS Office documents and plain-text files. At least, not out of the box. But it is easy to add that capability.

The Technical FAQ for Windows Search contains the answer, and it is easy enough to find on Google — once the possibility comes to mind.

Windows Search can handle the file formats Microsoft controls, plus ASCII text. PDF is a proprietary file format, although there are free programs that can read and produce it. Ergo, there are licensing restrictions on who can include what PDF-related functionality in their software. (As an aside, this is why proprietary standards are annoying and harmful; they stop people from doing things that would obviously be useful.) If I had to guess, it may have been licensing reasons that stopped Microsoft from including PDF functionality in Windows’ search feature.

Windows Search is designed to be extensible, though. Software vendors can write a drop-in component called an “IFilter” that users can install, and then Windows Search will be able to process a new file format. This is pretty similar to the idea of a browser plug-in like we use to play Flash video or view PDFs in a Web browser, though instead of plugging into the browser it plugs into the Windows Search software. (Why Microsoft didn’t just call it a Search plug-in is beyond me.)

An IFilter for PDF documents is available from either Adobe or Foxit. You only need one of the two, so take your pick. I downloaded the Adobe version and voilà! I can find the word “magus” in that big folder full of e-books I just bought.

Windows Search can find text inside PDF documents like these e-books, if you download and install the right IFilter.

Two orcs are getting blasted by Todd's wizard using a 3x3 area effect: probably Thunderwave

Playing D&D 4E pretty much requires the use of tabletop miniatures (or some equivalent, like cardstock counters). During one of the early sessions of our current campaign, I realized that the wizards in particular were using a lot of area effects. Probably that’s because wizards have access to first-level powers that can be used at will.

I found that fussing over where exactly to place these area effects was slowing down the flow of play. So I went to a craft store and bought some pipe cleaners and made a few simple outlines of 3″x3″ and 5″x5″ areas. In Fourth Edition, all area effects are square, so you really need only a couple of different sizes.

These work amazingly well. Now every time one of the wizards casts a spell, his player plunks down the pipe-cleaner outline and we can all tell at a glance which monsters are going to have a bad day.

Warning: Apparently these carefully shaped pipe cleaners are the best cat toys ever according to my cat Merlin. So if you leave your pipe-cleaner templates unattended on the table, and you have a cat, you can expect to find them the next day, under the couch, crusted in dried cat spit and mangled into postmodern art. The one in this photo is all kinked because it has been resurrected from just such a fate.

Good Things About 4E

Here are some of the things we liked.

More Tactical Choice

The way powers work in 4E means that every characters has a selection of powers that can be used at will. Most of those powers are pretty good: things like the ranger’s Hit and Run power or the wizard’s Magic Missile. The players said they always had the feeling of having something useful to do. This was a big change for the wizard in particular.

Something I did not expect is that it’s actually easier for players to keep track of their characters’ abilities and options in 4E. This has everything to do with the innovation called power cards. Along with the 4E character sheet come cards, each about the size of a playing card, on which the characters’ powers are printed. No more flipping through the rule book in the middle of battle! Players can and do speed up battle by looking at the cards to plan their next move while other players are taking their turns. Of course in order to get the power cards one has to either use the D&D Character Builder software or buy the cards as a game accessory.

Easier Encounter Design

I was playing a prepared adventure but I read enough of the Dungeon Master’s Guide to see that encounter design in 4E is a lot easier, especially if you don’t have exactly four characters in the party. This is something that increasingly matters as the party advances in level.

Minions!

A minion in 4E is a monster that looks and behaves like a regular monster and has roughly the attack scores and damage as a regular monster, but has only one hit point. This makes it into a disposable “extra.” What I like about this is that the players can’t tell by looking how tough the encounter will be. They might be able to handle twelve goblins at first level if the goblins are all minions; on the other hand five goblins will be a challenge if there are no minions among them. That uncertainty means that players are always a little leery of going into battle against superior numbers. They’re more ready to flee if things turn against them. At the same time, minions’ tendency to keel over dead from a paper cut means that intelligent monsters should be less aggressive (I’m assuming the monsters do not know ahead of time how many hit points they each have). It’s less attractive to the monsters to chase a fleeing band of adventurers if the monsters have just seen those adventurers hack their way through two dozen of their kinsmen. So minions give the DM a way to keep the players guessing and at the same time they make battle easier for the player characters to survive. What’s not to like?

Players also tend to groan when they “waste” their best daily power on a minion. To that I can only say, choose your targets carefully. After the first battle involving minions my players learned to only use their best powers on opponents who had already survived one hit.

I was skeptical about minions at first. They’re one example of something that works better in actual play than it would seem from first reading about it.

Skill Challenges

Skill challenges are the best argument against my earlier assertion that D&D Fourth Edition is only about combat. A skill challenge is an encounter where characters use their skills instead of fighting something. Generally speaking the challenge is set up so the characters have to pass a certain number of skill checks before failing another number of checks: for example, accumulate 6 successes before accumulating 3 failures, or the like. Here’s the new and important thing: skill challenges are considered encounters. Characters actually get experience points for them!

Awarding experience points for non-combat encounters is not, in itself, new. DMs have been doing that as a house rule since I was in junior high school. I believe Second Edition D&D talked about it and Third Edition spent a couple of paragraphs on it as well. Those previous editions awarded non-combat experience points in a very ad hoc way without offering the DM much in the way of constructive advice. In fact, the 3.5 edition of the DMG comes right out and says to make the non-combat awards low so as not to overshadow the XP gained from slaying and pillaging. The breakthrough in Fourth Edition is that there are rules that make the XP awards for skill challenges exactly equivalent to those from slaying monsters. A DM can build a whole encounter entirely out of skill challenges, or can mix and match skill challenges and monsters in the same encounter.

With a spoonful of imagination, a DM can get a lot of mileage out of a skill challenge encounter. This matters a lot to me. I’ve been playing D&D for 30 years now. Believe it or not, just fighting monsters for all that time can get kind of boring.

Rituals

Another criticism I had that was not entirely well-founded was the lack of non-combat spells. While it’s true that the spells for each character class are heavily oriented toward combat, there is another class of spells called rituals that can only be cast outside of combat (because they take several minutes to an hour to cast, and as the name suggests they require extensive materials and preparation).

I like the idea of rituals because I don’t think a wizard’s best spell should be something he can dash off in a round or two in the middle of battle. I prefer the atmosphere of the spellcaster having to draw magic circles on the floor, light seven candles infused with different mystical substances, wait until the moon and planets are in favorable alignment, and so on. Rituals bring that into the game (well except maybe the moon and planets part), and that’s cool.

The selection of rituals in the Player’s Handbook is scanty but most of them are good, solid rituals that are worth using. The selection of rituals has expanded a lot as additional supplements have been published. That goes a long way to ameliorate my complaint about the lack of non-combat spells.

Problems I Still See

While all of the foregoing give me enough reason to pick up 4th Edition and play it again, I do so with some reservations.

Characters Development is Narrow and Linear

The style of character development in Third Edition was much more to my liking than that in Fourth. In Third Edition, the rules made it possible to choose a character concept and then shape the character’s abilities to fit that concept. In Fourth Edition, all the concepts and options are written into the character classes ahead of time. This shows up clearly in the explicit 4E concepts of character builds, paragon paths, and epic destinies.

Builds are specific themes within a character class. For instance, if you’ve decided to play a paladin, there are two builds available: the avenging paladin, who is more oriented toward smiting enemies with his powers, and the protecting paladin, who is more (obviously) oriented toward defensive powers. That is fine as far as it goes, but the character classes as written seem to support only two builds. If you’re playing a paladin and you want a third option, say a “visionary paladin” who is guided by messages from his deity, there aren’t any powers for your class that are compatible with that concept. While you might be able to get part of what you’re looking for by choosing the right feats and through the 4E version of multi-classing, it seems likely you’ll come up short.

The analogy I use is one of transportation. The 3E character development process was like driving an off-road vehicle: you could follow the expected path if you wanted, or go in any direction at any time. 4E character development is more like riding a train. You can get on any track at the station, but once you’re on it, you can only go on one path, and you can only change trains at the scheduled stops. The 4E approach is probably easier for newcomers, and power-gamers won’t care, but since I’m not neither a newcomer nor a power-gamer, I miss the ability to take my characters in new directions as his story unfolds.

Goofiness is Creeping In

I have to say it: some of the races and classes that are coming into 4E are downright goofy. My pet peeve are psionics, which just don’t seem to fit into a fantasy theme alongside arcane and divine (and, in 4E, primal) magic. I was never a fan of minotaurs as a player-character race. There are a number of other issues, from the flavor text of many powers (such as “your weapon glows with holy light…”) to new races such as the shardmind, crystalline beings with psionic powers.

On one hand, goofiness and coolness are in the eye of the beholder. Some people probably think the dragonborn are goofy. I happen to think they rock. On the other hand, I don’t remember having this problem with Third Edition D&D. Well, except with the dragon disciple prestige class: the exception that proves the rule.

Maybe it’s just that Fourth Edition is aimed at a younger audience. Another factor is that with a product line as prolific as D&D, it is probably inevitable that not everything in the canon will be to everyone’s liking. Of my various criticisms of Fourth Edition D&D, this is the easiest for me to work around: I just cherry-pick the races and monsters and magic items I find appealing, and ignore the goofy ones. There is always the possibility that one of my players may have different tastes and want to play something I think is goofy, like a minotaur or a shardmind. An opportunity lies within that risk, though: if the player can convince me why this goofy race or character class is actually cool, then I’ll work it into my world. Everybody wins.

D&D is a Collectible Roleplaying Game

Wizards of the Coast is cranking out supplements for 4E at a downright alarming rate. At the time of this writing, 4E is only two and a half years old and already the Product Catalog lists 93 accessories. Ninety-three! I can’t imagine how anyone, including the full-time D&D design staff, can keep track of and actually use that much material. We can look forward to several more years of expanding complexity before the inevitable reset with D&D 5E.

The so-called “core” books have become annual periodicals. There are already a Player’s Handbook 2, Player’s Handbook 3, a Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, and a Monster Manual 2 and 3. This would not be so bad except that the “core” character classes and races from the 3E Player’s Handbook are now spread across three volumes. The reason it took me two years to actually try Fourth Edition was that my current party contains a monk, and monks weren’t available until Player’s Handbook 3. This is a marketing strategy reminiscent of the reason I quit reading comic books: in order to follow the continuity, you have to subscribe to 3 or 4 different titles. Then there is this new “D&D Essentials” product line, which as far as I can tell is anything but essential because I was playing D&D just fine before it came out. It’s not the expense that bothers me most: gaming products are cheap when you look at them in terms of dollars per hour of entertainment. It’s the amount of space these products take up on my shelf, and the trouble of trying to play a game whose rules are sprawled across seven different books and 2500 pages.

D&D Insider is the solution to this. The best feature of D&D Insider is the “rules compendium,” which contains the full text of all the monsters, feats, powers, magic items, races, classes, etc. from all the books in a searchable database format. This is a much better way to manage the ever-expanding rule set than trying to hoard the right subset of hardcover books. This is especially true when the ratio of cool and useful content to goofy and extraneous content is steadily diminishing with each new game supplement. It’s as if Wizards of the Coast is trying its darndest to train me not to buy its printed books.

Unfortunately, D&D Insider has its own problems.

D&D Insider is Screwing With Customers

Wizards of the Coast has a long history of over-promising and under-delivering when it comes to electronic play aids for D&D. Just recently, I thought they were finally reversing that unhappy trend: the downloadable Character Builder program was actually pretty functional, though I can’t say anything nice about its user interface. In fact it was Character Builder’s usefulness that motivated me to buy a subscription to D&D Insider.

But, as of about a month ago, Wizards of the Coast has reverted to type. They canceled the decent Character Builder tool and replaced it with a shambling wreck of an online-only substitute. I started to rant about this and the words came so easily, I really should make another post about it. Suffice to say, they used to offer a tool I liked, and just when I was starting to warm up to their digital offerings, they yanked that tool away from me and handed me … something else, to put it politely. To add insult to injury, they’ve clearly spent their development budget on fixing a tool that wasn’t broken, instead of implementing a new feature that would bring new benefits to the customer.

This is a continuation of the pattern of abuse that customers of D&D Insider should be used to by now.

Conclusions

So, I’m in a bit of a quandary about D&D 4E. It’s fun to play at the level of an individual game session. For longer-term character development, it seems less satisfying than 3E but I can probably work around it. I don’t really like what Wizards of the Coast is doing with their product line and I heartily dislike the way they’re treating me as a customer. I’m sorely tempted to let my D&D Insider subscription run out, but I’m not sure the game would be really playable without the DM having it.

So what I’ll do instead is what I’ve done with other editions of D&D: I’ll play it, but I’ll stick to the core books and resist spending a lot of money on it. I’ve always taken a more creative approach to D&D than really seems to fit with the product lineup TSR, and now Wizards of the Coast, chose to offer.

The Adventure

My (ir)regular gaming group had a couple of people who couldn’t make it, so we couldn’t really play our regular campaign. I figured this was a great opportunity to create a batch of new 1^st-level characters and take 4E for a spin.

I ran the published introductory adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell. Back when 4E was new, I shelled out 30 bucks for this baby in all its glossy, full-color glory. So I was none too happy when a year or so ago Wizards of the Coast released it as a free PDF download. The lesson here is clear: don’t buy D&D products now. You’ll be able to get them for free later. I’ll say more about that when I write about D&D Insider.

How it Played

Keep on the Shadowfell is actually a pretty well-written adventure. One thing that really encouraged me was there was explicit advice for the DM about how to set the mood and build tension. It is not, in fact, all hack ‘n’ slash. So I was optimistic about how this might play out.

The result can only be described as a disaster. My players were too smart for this adventure. Without giving away any spoilers, they went through the initial encounter on the road, arrived in Winterhaven, had some nice role-playing as they asked all the right questions and found out a lot of information, then left town and walked straight into Encounter A1 just like it says they’re supposed to.

My players made the obvious connection that Encounter A1 indicates the presence of a serious threat to Winterhaven and they decided to set aside their personal agenda and go deal with it. This led them straightforwardly to Encounter A2, and then A3. At the point they reached A3 they were of course still first level (having been through three encounters total since we started playing 4E about three hours earlier). Encounter A3 is a Level 6 encounter. The inevitable result: TPK (Total Party Kill).

So, in my opinion Keep on the Shadowfell has a major design flaw. It seems to me that any group of adventurers with half a brain will follow exactly the same path my group did, with the same result. Who the heck playtested this thing?

More to Come

I have more to say about the actual play experience of the 4E rules, but that will have to wait for another post.

This makes me think of science-fiction games, especially cyberpunk games. I kind of like the idea of characters painting their faces with camouflage patterns before they run the shadows. And, it’s based on Real Science! (And on the premise that face recognition software in that ultra-high-tech, futuristic world is not a whole lot better than what we have in the real world today. I think that’s called “dramatic license.”)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that cyber-elf chicks with Mohawks and facepaint are cool. That’s all.

Since I started in semi-professional game design a couple of years ago (I co-authored a couple of supplements for Ars Magica), I’ve undergone a big shift in my approach to game design. I’ve moved from being a simulationist to being much more of a gamist.

The simulationist approach to games looks for rules and systems that try to some extent to simulate reality. Simulationist games tend to have lots of rules and the rules tend to be rather complex because they try to cover everything, or at least as much as possible. D&D Third Edition is probably about as far toward the simulationist end of the spectrum as mainstream games are likely to get. In the 1980s and ’90s there were other simulationist games out there — Rolemaster, Aftermath! — I’m dating myself but you get the idea.

Now, simulationist games have a lot going for them. They offer a lot of options. It’s easy to get creative traction, both as a player and as a gamemaster, when the rules cover so many different kinds of situations. Besides, they appeal to my fascination with learning.

The contrasting approach, which I call “gamist,” is not concerned with trying to make rules terribly realistic, but instead focuses on trying to make the game fun to play. Simplicity is not an inherent value of gamist systems, but gamist systems do tend to be simpler because to a gamist, complexity is not valued for its own sake. They tend toward abstract rules that leave a lot to the judgment and imagination of the players. First edition Ars Magica was probably the most gamist system I played in my heavy-gaming college days, not that there is anyone else left alive who actually played that game.

So, why the switch? I’ve finally come around to realize that trying to make a complete, simulationist game is a fool’s errand. It’s a huge undertaking and no one has the knowledge and insight to make a perfect simulationist system. Therefore all simulationist games have flaws, and the longer you play those types of games, the more apparent the flaws become. When I was younger I didn’t much notice, because like most gamers I cheerfully disregarded any rule I didn’t like. This became second nature, to the point where I didn’t really realize how often I was doing it. In fact, I strongly suspect I did this when I didn’t remember a particular rule and didn’t care to be bothered to look it up.

Today, my years of experience as an engineer have made me a lot better at working to a specification and looking things up when I don’t know them off the top of my head. Working as a playtester for Ars Magica taught me to apply those habits to games. When I play a simulationist game, I now habitually play the game exactly as written and I end up looking up a lot of things. Very often I am a bit disappointed with what I find: either it seems unrealistic to me (and what’s the point of playing a simulationist game if the end result is unrealistic), or it’s unbalanced (meaning unfair in some practical sense), or it takes ten minutes to explain the rule to my gaming group. My years of experience as an engineer have also made me better at finding fault. Simulation is hard to do well.

There are other factors. I’ve been playing RPGs for about three decades now, and the classic dungeon crawl has kind of lost its appeal. If I’m in the mood for senseless, repetitive violence in a game, computer games can provide it on demand. As my gaming buddies and I start families and even (gasp!) take up other hobbies, face-to-face games get fewer and farther between. At the same time, computer games are getting better at delivering a good simulationist experience. What I’m looking for in a face-to-face game these days are the things computer games can’t provide: the human element. That means a strong story, compelling characters, and in-depth role-playing, plus the social aspects of a face-to-face game. Simulationist RPG rules don’t help with any of that (though neither do they necessarily hurt).

As games have become harder to schedule and gamers harder to find, I find myself losing interest in forcing a complex, simulationist rule system on my players. These friends of mine are adults who have their own priorities and their own preferences. They’re willing to play along with a complex game, but they then understandably tend to look to me to be the rules expert and to guide them. Taking even two minutes out of the action to explain something like the D&D (Third Edition) grappling rules tends to ruin the action. The bigger the group, the bigger this issue becomes. Complex rule sets don’t scale well to big groups. My 3rd Ed. D&D group has seven, and that is about as big a group as I’d care to handle with those rules.

These days, I don’t get a thrill out of memorizing a 300-page book of rules. I can do that all I want in my day job. Likewise, I want to be able to create and level up a character without having to use a computer program to do it. I still play D&D because I and all my players are invested in that system (part nostalgia, part tradition), and Ars Magica (which can’t seem to figure out whether it’s simulationist or
gamist) because I love the setting and the magic system so much. If I were to pick up a new game, though, it would probably be something relatively lightweight. I bought a copy of Savage Worlds a few months ago. It’s a complete game in one, 160-page paperback and it’s just the sort of thing I feel ready to try.

What I Found

I found a great site at www.rpgvirtualtabletop.com that compares several different programs for online gaming. A “Virtual tabletop” is any software that is meant to do the job of a physical gaming table: providing a map display, “miniatures” (little icons you can move around to show where the characters and monsters are), a dice roller, and usually some kind of chat. If you’re interested in playing tabletop RPGs online, that site is a good starting point to see what’s available.

My New Favorite

My new favorite game aid is called InitiatveTool, part of the RPTools suite. My D&D group has a large party (7 player characters plus an animal companion) and they often encounter groups of a dozen or more humanoids. Rolling initiative and sorting all the characters into initiative order can be quite a production. I used to do this by hand.

PCGen has a feature that will do this (on the GMGen tab) but PCGen is a serious memory hog and it gets seriously bogged down after loading that many characters and their opponents.

Enter InitiativeTool. It is much more lightweight than PCGen and does not run out of memory after loading all the combatants in the battle. It does quite a bit more than just keep track of initiative. As you can see from the screenshot, it also displays a character sheet for the character or monster whose turn it is.

InitiativeTool tracks initiative in the left pane and displays a character sheet in the right

InitiativeTool includes handy timers to keep track of events such as when a spell expires. I am quite impressed with it but I do have to mention two drawbacks to the tool. First, the RPTools developers have done their level best to hide any kind of documentation. Supposedly there are forums and a Wiki but I have not been able to find them. Second, data entry into InitiativeTool is a royal pain. The interface is a tree view of the data structure of the character and you have to expand and collapse each node in order to edit it. No fun for typing in 7 PCs and 20 orcs. I’m pleased to say, InitiativeTool ships with pre-loaded statistics for all the monsters in the 3.5 SRD, so you rarely have to type in the monsters; and there is a work-around to avoid typing the PCs as well, but it is not perfect.

If you want to give InitiativeTool a try, I recommend you use the stable version (1.0.b24 at the time of this writing). Anything more recent will probably have spiffy new features, but it’s hit and miss as to which of them will be working. I’ve tried it both ways — the stable version provides a better experience.

InitiativeTool-PCGen Compatibility

The best thing about InitiativeTool is that it can load data created by other tools. That way you do not have to use its tortuous data-entry interface. Recent versions of PCGen (5.14 and later) can export a character sheet to InitiativeTool format. Simply use File -> export -> To Text and choose the cryptically-named csheet_InitTool.rpgrp. This creates an output file that can then be read into InitiativeTool as a “group” of characters.

In a lot of ways, this offers the best of both worlds. PCGen is great for editing a character and checking all the arithmetic, but it can’t really handle more than two or three characters at a time. InitiativeTools is good for displaying many characters at a time but for creating and editing characters, it’s less powerful and a lot less convenient to use than PCGen.

My experience with this is that it works pretty well for the stable version of InitiativeTool. For some characters, there are some slight errors in the output file that cause InitiativeTool to fail to load it. For me, this had mostly to do with the location of the character portraits (stored in the “token” tag of the .rpgrp file). I was able to open the .rpgrp file with a text editor, hand-edit it to delete the offending “token” tags, and then the file loaded fine. So for the stable version of InitiativeTool, the feature has some inconveniences but it works. I tried loading the same (fixed) file into the latest unstable version, and it wouldn’t load at all. This is why I recommend against the unstable version.

It appears the RPTools team is also working on their own character editor called CharTool. I tried it but could not figure out how to make it produce output that can be loaded into InitiativeTool, and as I’ve said the RPTools documentation is missing in action. My guess is that CharTool is in the pretty early stages of development and its integration with InitiativeTool isn’t done yet.

New Page on my Blog

I’ve created a new page on this blog for Electronic Game Aids. I’ll update that from time to time as I discover new software that I find useful.

Wizards of the Coast is within their rights to do this, but I do not think it was a smart move. A lot of gamers rely heavily on PDF books and spend quite a bit of money on them. It seems unlikely that customers who were still buying Wizards of the Coast PDFs — all Third Edition — will take their gaming dollars and invest them in new 4E hardcover books instead. More likely, they will switch to buying non-WotC PDFs and/or unauthorized downloading of D&D books.

Let’s face it: D&D 4E is not the roaring success that 3E was. That is probably because it is not as good a game. Cutting off sales of a superior product to divert customers to an inferior product is never a good move. It reminds me of what Microsoft did to WIndows XP when Vista came out.

Like Microsoft, Wizards of the Coast is alienating once-loyal customers. Unlike Microsoft, its dominant position in the marketplace really is vulnerable. Instead of learning from the makes of TSR, Wizards of the Coast seems to be doing all it can to repeat them. It’s stumbling toward irrelevancy.