What D&D doesn’t offer me

I’ve been keeping track of the D&D5E playtest stuff, liking some of what they’re doing, but also taking a hard look at why D&D, for me, never really goes as smoothly or nicely as I’d like. It mostly comes down to what I want out of fantasy, and how efficient other games are at hitting that, in a way D&D isn’t.

Generating Interesting Stuff in Play

There’s basically two methods that end up being the default ways in which D&D gets run.

First, the dungeon (equally, the sandbox world), where the action is mostly contingent on the players choosing to travel and explore. The thing about this is that going too fast can get your characters killed, going too slow is boring. It’s definitely a tradeoff but definitely punishes either end and makes for a high learning curve. A lot of the action that happens in these often turns out to be when things go wrong – whether that’s a simple plan gone to crap or a series of unlucky rolls. Note that rogue-like videogames pretty much fulfill this same gameplay space.

Second, the branching path story. This is exactly identical to what most videogame rpgs are right now, except they have an advantage in that (well designed) games never leave players poking around not know what to do for long periods of time – there’s characters who give you quests, submenus that help you remember what you needed to do, etc. All the sort of fussing around that happens in a tabletop game (“Is this character really important or not? Will they betray us? Are they telling the truth?” “Look, he’s the waiter, he doesn’t matter, ok?”).

What I want instead

Mostly what I end up interested in is exploring a world in terms of flavor if not endless almanacs of details, and seeing (and playing) different characters with interesting goals and motivations and personality – with fun action fights.

When you’re digging through an area trying not to die, the details take precendence over flavor, and when most of what you encounter is trying to eat you, there’s not a lot of room for interesting motivations or personality.

Likewise, branching path games don’t give you a lot of room to have your characters’ motivations or personality make much of a difference.

In a lot of ways, what I end up wanting from D&D is better supplied by other games. I’m thinking the next time I run D&D I will have to have a hack to basically establish scene framing and skip this whole dungeon or prepped encounters things altogether.

Iterative Rolls and Excitement (or not)

Further thoughts on yesterday’s 90 minute D&D game, has me thinking about the part where things slowed down – the boss fight.

I’m realizing a key aspect of game design that infuses most of the rpgs I play at this point is how much the game state changes compared to the amount of effort put into resolution (dice rolling, card drawing, etc.) – very much the stuff I was talking about Whiff Factor.

D&D has you roll an attack, then roll damage – if the attack misses, nothing changes, and technically, until hitpoints are 0 (or, the monster is bloodied in 4E) no changes happen either. Add in the fact my boss had 30 hitpoints, and 15 AC, meaning a) it’s going to take an average of 9 hits (3.5 damage on a D6) and b) at best 50% of any attacks will hit.

This means we’re talking (average) 18 attack rolls (assuming no one does anything else, like heal, or stunt, etc.) and 9 damage rolls. Divided by 4 players, 4.5 trips around the table. In actuality I think it was 6-7 trips around the table, because, as I pointed out, people end up doing more than “attack, attack, attack”. The last 2 rounds for the players were pretty slow because everyone started rolling poorly, and you could see the energy starting to drop around the table.

This makes it very different than say, a fighting videogame where you’re not going to get too many misses before the counterattack, and 3 seconds is a lot of time for things to happen. It also is very different than craps, which at least for being a completely randomized game with no real strategy or dressing, changes the game state (do you win or lose money?) very quickly. In both cases, at least, the turnaround time between “failure result” and changes to game state are very quick.

This is also why a lot of D&D ends up talking about “the sweet spot” which is a place where the iterative rolls are not too out of hand (because, the hitpoint totals are not too high, such as “E6 D&D”). 4E tried to add conditions on to failed rolls, but either the effects were too small, or only useful in narrow situations.

Compared to other games where either the iterative rolls/resolutions are limited to specific, short number (Covenant, Trollbabe), resolution spirals towards completion (Sorcerer), game states change quickly (Apocalypse World, Riddle of Steel), the typical assumptions in a lot of D&D and D&D descended design where misses and non-results approximate 50% of the results, are kind of a thing to just avoid or keep minimal from the get-go if you’re making a new game.

90 Minute D&D

A work acquaintance asked if I played D&D, since he was interested in checking it out. Much like I used The One Hour Burning Wheel Game, I figured I should pare down the experience to give the simplest, quickest fun as an introduction. I had my coworker, his partner, and my two gaming regulars, only one of whom was at all really into D&D.

The First Hurdle

The more I end up playing and introducing new gamers to roleplaying, the more I see D&D is just not a great intro game, beyond name recognition. The basic “interface” of roleplaying, though simple, is really unlike any other kind of boardgame or cardgame – players have to become comfortable with 3 things that are unique to roleplaying:

- There is no list of moves to choose from – you can describe anything you want to do within the expectations of the genre and you do it.
- You can and should ask questions to define what is going on- there is no board or cards to refer to the game state, it sits in your head and your ability to get necessary information is critical
- You should say things in character, you should have characters interact like acting or writing a story

That’s a lot right there- stacking on stats, modifiers, attack, armor class, hitpoints, speed, encumbrance, etc. etc. is even more.

I looked at the simplest versions of D&D I have – Red Box D&D, and the 5E playtest. The former was less complex, but had the problems of high lethality and little for casters to do, and the latter was a bit more complex than what I wanted knowing I had to usher 4 players through the process, only one of whom would be proficient in it.

So, I cut things down.

Creating Characters

It’s not just that you can make a pregen, because new players still have to learn what a character sheet is, or how stats work. In many games asking a completely new player “What’s your Armor Class?” turns into a thing where they’re trying to navigate their character sheet (and also, trying to remember if this abstract question is answered on the sheet or something they’re supposed to keep in their head, or what), instead of them engaging with play in a meaningful way.

So, I dropped attributes, modifiers and cut characters down the most basic stats:
Hitpoints, Attack Bonus, Armor Class. Players pick a Class with preset stats, and a Race that modifies it.

Classes

Strong Fighter
Attack +4
Hit Points 8
Armor Class 18

Abilities:
- Once per game, ignore all damage from a single hit (stolen from Stars Without Number)
- Protect your friends: friends who stay next to you get +2 AC in combat

Fast Fighter
Attack +4
Hitpoints 8
Armor Class 16

Abilities:
- Once per game, take a second turn
- Cleave- everytime you drop an enemy with melee, take an extra attack

Wizard
Attack: +0
Hitpoints: 6
Armor Class: 12

Abilities:
- Magic Missle – auto hits for 1D6+1. You can cast twice a game
- Sleep – Put 2D6 monsters to sleep in a 30′ circle, once per game

Cleric
Attack: +2
Hitpoints: +6
Armor Class: 17

Abilities:
- Make Light – cast a light spell anytime all the time
- Cure Wounds – Heal 1D6 hit points. You can cast twice a game.

Thief
Attack: +2
Hitpoints: +6
Armor Class: 16

Abilities:
- Sneak Attack +4 to hit and double damage

Races

Humans: +1 damage to attack rolls
Dwarves: +4 Hitpoints
Elves: +1 Armor Class
Halflings: 3 rerolls per game

Playing the Game

Everything besides combat? Skills, Saving Throws, Attribute checks? Roll a D20, and beat a 10 to succeed. If your character class makes you particularly good at that thing (Strong Fighter doing something involving might and toughness, Thief being sneaky, etc.) roll 2D20 and keep the higher one.

Combat? For initiative roll a D6 for each side and the winning side goes first, in whatever order they feel like. Attacks are modified +2 if an advantage, +4 if a big advantage, -2, -4 for disadvantage accordingly. Hits do a D6 damage.

How it played out

I ran the group through 2 encounters. One against some goblins on a bridge and the second against a giant serpent in some ruins. The players worked well together and had a great time. My coworker had a couple of fun moves, but his partner who was playing a thief pulled off tons of slick stunts which gave the group +2 or +4 bonuses in the fight. None of the PCs were killed, though 3 of the 4 got seriously hurt at one point.

The only thing I feel I would do differently in the future is give the monsters lower Armor Class ratings to avoid whiff factor. By the very end, the combat lasted about 3 rounds longer than it should have from the players rolling poorly, and I think giving monsters lower ACs would have been just fine.

Party wise, we had: an Elven Strong Fighter, an Elven Fast Fighter, a Dwarven Cleric, and a Dwarven Thief. (Clearly I need to see if the wizard is balanced or what, but it was solid with what I had).

At some point in the future, I should probably put this together with the quickie adventure and have it ready for the next time I introduce new folks to D&D.

After the game, we pointed out to the new folks that D&D is also many different games, and that even the most basic version is much more complicated than what they played – showing the Red Box character sheet drew some comment about the complexity of it, which made me all the more glad to have done my pared down version instead.

Overall, it was a big success, but I’m continuing to learn more and more about how to get roleplaying experiences down to digestible, understandable chunks for non-gamers.

The Many XPs of D&D

With all the D&D5/ D&DNext stuff going on, one of the ideas that keeps getting brought up is the idea of this new system being flexible enough to adapt to the many ways of playing D&D.  An easy dial to design around is what rewards XP?  Pretty much if you want to know what kind of D&D you’re playing, having a reward system that matches up with it is an easy way to go.

BECMI, AD&D1, both focused mostly on rewarding treasure hunting.  This is very different than AD&D2′s way of rewarding spellcasting, or skill use.  And that’s also different than 3E’s encounter rewards, or 4E’s Quests.   So we can already see throughout the history of D&D, XP is an easy system to change what game you’re really playing without necessarily digging in too deep into the other mechanics.

So, an idea (whether for 5E, or to tack onto whichever D&D you choose to play), would be to have XP sockets- you plug in a few based on how you want this particular campaign of D&D to play.  This needs to be clearly laid out to the group and discussed so everyone’s on the same page.

Things which have been rewarded for in past D&D:

- Gold/Treasure (heist – get treasure, get out)
– Spending Gold (Spend it on non-adventure stuff, get XP)
- Fighting Monsters (classic hack and slash)
- Overcoming Traps (dungeon delving)
- Casting Spells in an Adventure/Towards a cause
- Using Skills in an Adventure
- Completing Specific Tasks/Quests

House rules for XP rewards:
- Exploring the dungeon (Tunnels & Trolls did this, OSR folks, etc.)
- Politics and Drama (In Thy Name)

This post is a pretty good example of how people can craft their D&D very specifically using a variety of XP choices to shape the game.

Most D&D has historically picked a default manner and sort of lumped off the other options without much advice or support for the DM – instead, it’d be nice to lay out a couple of defaults, then show DM’s how they can pick and choose amongst a menu for very different D&D games.

Obviously, the other half of it would be designing & how to run (dungeons, adventures, prep) to meet those XP choices, along with an understanding of what pacing makes sense for the group.

Labeling some common mixes will also help groups figure out what kind of play they’re looking for (“Hack & Slash means XP for monsters, and high encounter ratio”, “Heist means X for gold but nothing else”, “Delver gives XP for traps and exploration” etc.)

This is going to be one of those core issues if they’re serious about trying to support multiple play styles for D&D – especially since they have to compete with every previous edition as well as the OSR crowd- if you don’t give the play base something they can’t get elsewhere (or already have), then there’s no reason for them to get in on it. Unfortunately for WOTC, D&D isn’t about designing a game to sell fresh, it’s about designing a game for an existing culture, which has some extra stuff they’ll need to navigate around from the past.

D&D and the one-hour game

I guess I’m not the only one talking about a full adventure/game in an hour’s time.

Mike Mearls lists some pretty good concerns for the 1 hour game, though, I wonder how the same adventure would have worked out with folks who have no background in D&D as the group running it – whether it would flow in an hour or not.

Mike Mearls talks about the rules, but I think there’s specific issues D&D needs to address to make a functional 1 hour game:

Clear goals from the beginning, getting into adventure quickly

The goal of the adventure should either be simply told to the players or roleplayed in the first few minutes. This, should never happen:

“Oh. I guess we’re in town. We look around. Oh, I guess we’ll need to ask for rumors if anyone is hiring. Oh. I guess we’ll hang out at the tavern. Oh. I guess we’ll talk to 4-5 people before talking to the skeevy guy in the corner who is hiring. Oh. I guess we’ll have to convince one of the other PCs to come along with us. Oh. I guess we’ll have to find our way to the dungeon…”

That’s made up the first session (or more!) of games I’ve seen, and it’s terrible.

So, the set up should probably always be at the beginning of the dungeon/adventure site with a clear goal of what the players need to do by the end.

No blocks

If you have anything like a puzzle, or trap, or locked door which is the sole means of getting on with the adventure, and it can’t be bypassed, then you have something which could potentially be a giant waste of time. Especially if the players go about it the wrong way, or get the wrong idea.

Hidden stuff has to be handled differently

D&D has had many different ways of handling traps, secret doors, and hidden treasure- ranging from “Describe how you examine things” to “Roll 1D6 on a 1-2 you find it”. That said, whatever method you end up going with, you do not want the players spending most of the game saying, “I carefully search” every 10 feet of dungeon because they’re afraid of getting instantly killed or missing the uber +5 sword hidden in Otyugh dung.

The thing about this, is, it’s not terribly difficult to teach these to new players- the problem is being able to teach these to people who’ve already played D&D, and, likely, will be the ones running it for new players as the gateway gamers in the future.

While D&D is many things, and adventure can mean anything from desperately scrabbling to escape giant spiders to taking on dragons by yourself, no matter what, I don’t think anyone considers walking around town, trying to find out what you’re supposed to do, or sitting in front of a puzzle, being stuck, to be an adventurous time… much less a fun one.

And that is what’s going to matter for new folks.