"When creating house rules for a game you love, it's easy to get carried away."
"You sunk my battleship! In Irkutsk! With the candlestick!"
"I'm all in."
- Basic Instructions, "How to Create House Rules" by Scott Meyer

Although the conclusion is incorrect, there's an element of truth in this. For example, in A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes is investigating the scene of a murder. He discovers a small pile of ashes in the corner of the room. He studies them carefully and is able to conclude that the ashes have come from a Trichinopoly cigar.

Now, let's analyze how this relatively minor example of Holmesian deduction would play out at the game table:

(1) The players would need to successfully search the room.

(2) They would need to care enough about the ashes to examine them.

(3) They would need to succeed at a skill check to identify them.

(4) They would need to use that knowledge to reach the correct conclusion.

That's four potential points of failure: The PCs could fail to search the room (either because the players don't think to do it or because their skill checks were poor). The PCs could fail to examine the ashes (because they don't think them important). The PCs could fail the skill check to identify them. The PCs could fail to make the correct deduction.

If correctly understanding this clue is, in fact, essential to the adventure proceeding -- if, for example, the PCs need to go to the nearest specialty cigar shop and start asking questions -- then the clue serves as chokepoint: Either the PCs understand the clue or the PCs slam into a wall.

Chokepoints in adventure design are always a big problem and need to be avoided, but we can see that when it comes to a mystery scenario the problem is much worse: Each clue is not just one chokepoint, it's actually multiple chokepoints.

So the solution here is simple: Remove the chokepoints.

Continued tomorrow...

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Go to Part 1

For the GUMSHOE system (used in The Esoterrorists and The Trail of Cthulhu), Robin D. Laws decided to get rid of the concept of needing to find clues. In each "scene" of an investigation scenario, there is a "clue". It's automatically assumed that the investigators will find this clue.

This removes three of our four chokepoints, leaving only the necessity of using the clue to make the correct deduction (i.e., the deduction which moves you onto the next "scene" where the next clue can be imparted). And, in the case of the GUMSHOE system, even this step can be tackled mechanically (with the players committing points from their character's skills to receive increasingly accurate "deductions" from the GM).

This is a mechanical solution to the problem. But while it may result in a game session which superficially follows the structure of a mystery story, I think it fails because it doesn't particularly feel as if you're playing a mystery.

Laws' fundamental mistake, I think, is in assuming that a mystery story is fundamentally about following a "bread crumb trail" of clues. Here's a quote from a design essay on the subject:

But, in point of fact, this type of simplistic "A leads to B leads to C leads to D" plotting is not typical of the mystery genre. For a relatively simplistic counter-example, let's return to Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet:

This is just one small deduction in a much larger mystery, but you'll note that Holmes has in fact gathered several clues, studied them, and then distilled a conclusion out of them. And this is, in fact, the typical structure of the mystery genre: The detective slowly gathers a body of evidence until, finally, a conclusion emerges. In the words of Holmes himself, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

What is true, however, is that in many cases it is necessary for many smaller deductions to be made in order for all of the evidence required to solve the mystery to be gathered. However, as the example from A Study in Scarlet demonstrates, even these smaller deductions can be based on a body of evidence and not just one clue in isolation.

This observation leads us, inexorably, to the solution we've been looking for. 

Continued tomorrow...

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Go to Part 1

Whenever you're designing a mystery scenario, you should invariably follow the Three Clue Rule:

Why three? Because the PCs will probably miss the first; ignore the second; and misinterpret the third before making some incredible leap of logic that gets them where you wanted them to go all along.

I'm kidding, of course. But if you think of each clue as a plan (the PCs will find A, conclude B, and go to C), then when you have three clues you've not only got a plan -- you've also got two backup plans. And when you realize that your plans never survive contact with the players, the need for those backup plans becomes clear.

In a best case scenario, of course, the players will find all three clues. There's nothing wrong with that. They can use those clues to confirm their suspicions and reinforce their conclusions (just like Sherlock Holmes).

In a worst case scenario, they should be able to use at least one of these clues to reach the right conclusion and keep the adventure moving.

And here's an important tip: There are no exceptions to the Three Clue Rule.

"But Justin!" I hear you say. "This clue is really obvious. There is no way the players won't figure it out."

In my experience, you're probably wrong. For one thing, you're the one designing the scenario. You already know what the solution to the mystery is. This makes it very difficult for you to objectively judge whether something is obvious or not.

And even if you're right, so what? Having extra clues isn't going to cause any problems. Why not be safe rather than sorry?

EXTENDING THE THREE CLUE RULE

If you think about it in a broader sense, the Three Clue Rule is actually a good idea to keep in mind when you're designing any scenario.

Richard Garriott, the designer of the Ultima computer games and Tabula Rasa, once said that his job as a game designer was to make sure that at least one solution to a problem was possible without preventing the player from finding other solutions on their own. For example, if you find a locked door in an Ultima game then there will be a key for that door somewhere. But you could also hack your way through it; or pick the lock; or pull a cannon up to it and blow it away.

Warren Spector, who started working with Garriott on Ultima VI, would later go on to design Deus Ex. He follows the same design philosophy and speaks glowingly of the thrill he would get watching someone play his game and thinking, "Wait... is that going to work?"

When designing an adventure, I actually try to take this design philosophy one step further: For any given problem, I make sure there's at least one solution and remain completely open to any solutions the players might come up with on their own.

But, for any chokepoint problem, I make sure there's at least three solutions.

By a chokepoint, I mean any problem that must be solved in order for the adventure to continue.

For example, let's say that there's a secret door behind which is hidden some random but ultimately unimportant treasure. Finding the secret door is a problem, but it's not a chokepoint, so I only need to come up with one solution. In D&D this solution is easy because it's built right into the rules: The secret door can be found with a successful Search check.

But let's say that, instead of some random treasure, there is something of absolutely vital importance behind that door. For the adventure to work, the PCs must find that secret door.

The secret door is now a chokepoint problem and so I'll try to make sure that there are at least three solutions. The first solution remains the same: A successful Search check. To this we could add a note in a different location where a cultist is instructed to "hide the artifact behind the statue of Ra" (where the secret door is); a badly damaged journal written by the designer of the complex which refers to the door; a second secret door leading to the same location (this counts as a separate solution because it immediately introduces the possibility of a second Search check); a probable scenario in which the main villain will attempt to flee through the secret door; the ability to interrogate captured cultists; and so forth.

Once you identify a chokepoint like this, it actually becomes quite trivial to start adding solutions like this.

I've seen some GMs argue that this makes things "too easy". But the reality is that alternative solutions like this tend to make the scenario more interesting, not less interesting. Look at our secret door, for example: Before we started adding alternative solutions, it was just a dice roll. Now it's designed by a specific person; used by cultists; and potentially exploited as a get-away.

As you begin layering these Three Clue Rule techniques, you'll find that your scenarios become even more robust. For example, let's take a murder mystery in which the killer is a werewolf who seeks out his ex-lovers. We come up with three possible ways to identify the killer:

(1) Patrol the streets of the small town on the night of the full moon.

(2) Identify the victims as all being former lovers of the same man.

(3) Go to the local butcher shop where the killer works and find his confessions of nightmare and sin written in blood on the walls of the back room.

For each of these conclusions (he's a werewolf; he's a former lover; we should check out the butcher shop) we'll need three clues.

HE'S A WEREWOLF: Tracks that turn from wolf paw prints to human footprints. Over-sized claw marks on the victims. One of the victims owned a handgun loaded with silver bullets.

HE'S A FORMER LOVER: Love letters written by the same guy. A diary written by one victim describing how he cheated on her with another victim. Pictures of the same guy either on the victims or kept in their houses somewhere.

CHECK OUT THE BUTCHER SHOP: A broken crate reading DANNER'S MEATS at one of the crime scenes. A note saying "meet me at the butcher shop" crumpled up and thrown in a wastepaper basket. A jotted entry saying "meet P at butcher shop" in the day planner of one of the victims.

And just like that you've created a scenario with nine different paths to success. And if you keep your mind open to the idea of "more clues are always better" as you're designing the adventure, you'll find even more opportunities. For example, how trivial would it be to drop a reference to the butcher shop into one of those love letters? Or to fill that diary with half-mad charcoal sketches of wolves?

The fun part of all this is, once you've given yourself permission to include lots of clues, you've given yourself the opportunity to include some really esoteric and subtle clues. If the players figure them out, then they'll feel pretty awesome for having done so. If they don't notice them or don't understand them, that's OK, too: You've got plenty of other clues for them to pursue (and once they do solve the mystery, they'll really enjoy looking back at those esoteric clues and understanding what they meant).

Continued tomorrow...

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Go to Part 1

COROLLARY: PERMISSIVE CLUE-FINDING

The maxim "more clues are always better" is an important one. There is a natural impulse when designing a mystery, I think, to hold back information. This is logical inclination: After all, a mystery is essentially defined by a lack of information. And there's a difference between having lots of clues and having the murderer write his home address in blood on the wall.

But the desire to hold back information does more harm than good, I think. Whenever you hold back a piece of information, you are essentially closing off a path towards potential success. This goes back to Garriott's advice: Unless there's some reason why the door should be cannon-proof, the player should be rewarded for their clever thinking. Or, to put it another way: Just because you shouldn't leave the key to a locked door laying on the floor in front of the door, it doesn't mean that there shouldn't be multiple ways to get past the locked door.

With that in mind, you should consciously open yourself to permissive clue-finding. By this I mean that, if the players come up with a clever approach to their investigation, you should be open to the idea of giving them useful information as a result.

Here's another way of thinking about it: Don't treat the list of clues you came up with during your prep time as a straitjacket. Instead, think of that prep work as your safety net.

I used to get really attached to a particularly clever solution when I would design it. I would emotionally invest in the idea of my players discovering this clever solution that I had designed. As a result, I would tend to veto other potential solutions the players came up with -- after all, if those other solutions worked they would never discover the clever solution I had come up with.

Over time, I've learned that it's actually a lot more fun when the players surprise me. It's the same reason I avoid fudging dice rolls to preserve whatever dramatic conceit I came up with. As a result, I now tend to think of my predesigned solution as a worst case scenario -- the safety net that snaps into place when my players fail to come up with anything more interesting.

In order to be open to permissive clue-finding you first have to understand the underlying situation. (Who is the werewolf? How did he kill this victim? Why did he kill them? When did he kill them?) Then embrace the unexpected ideas and approaches the PCs will have, and lean on the permissive side when deciding whether or not they can find a clue you had never thought about before. 

COROLLARY: PROACTIVE CLUES

A.K.A. Bash Them On the Head With It.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the players will work themselves into a dead-end: They don't know what the clues mean or they're ignoring the clues or they've used the clues to reach an incorrect conclusion and are now heading in completely the wrong direction. (When I'm using the Three Clue Rule, I find this will most often happen when the PCs don't realize that there's actually a mystery that needs to be solved -- not every mystery is as obvious as a dead body, after all.)

This is when having a backup plan is useful. The problem in this scenario is that the PCs are being too passive -- either because they don't have the information they need or because they're using the information in the wrong way. The solution, therefore, is to have something active happen to them.

Raymond Chandler's advice for this kind of impasse was, "Have a guy with a gun walk through the door."

My typical fallback is in the same vein: The bad guy finds out they're the ones investigating the crime and sends someone to kill them or bribe them.

Another good one is "somebody else dies". Or, in a more general sense, "the next part of the bad guy's plan happens". This has the effect of 

The idea with all of these, of course, is not simply "have something happen". You specifically want to have the event give them a new clue (or, better yet, multiple clues) that they can follow up on.

In a worst case scenario, though, you can design a final "Get Out of Jail Free" card that you can use to bring the scenario to a satisfactory close no matter how badly the PCs get bolloxed up. For example, in our werewolf mystery -- if the PCs get completely lost -- you could simply have the werewolf show up and try to kill them (because he thinks they're "getting too close"). This is usually less than satisfactory, but at least it gets you out of a bad situation. It's the final backup when all other backups have failed.

Continued tomorrow...

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COROLLARY: RED HERRINGS ARE OVERRATED

Go to Part 1

Red herrings are a classic element of the mystery genre: All the evidence points towards X, but its a red herring! The real murderer is Y!

When it comes to designing a scenario for an RPG, however, red herrings are overrated. I'm not going to go so far as to say that you should never use them, but I will go so far as to say that you should only use them with extreme caution. 

There are two reasons for this:

First, getting the players to make the deductions they're supposed to make is hard enough. Throwing in a red herring just makes it all the harder. More importantly, however, once the players have reached a conclusion they'll tend to latch onto it. It can be extremely difficult to convince them to let it go and re-assess the evidence. (One of the ways to make a red herring work is to make sure that there will be an absolutely incontrovertible refutation of it: For example, the murders continue even after the PCs arrest a suspect. Unfortunately, what your concept of an "incontrovertible refutation" may hold just as much water as your concept of a "really obvious clue that cannot be missed.)

Second, there's really no need for you to make up a red herring: The players are almost certainly going to take care of it for you. If you fill your adventure with nothing but clues pointing conclusively and decisively at the real killer, I can virtually guarantee you that the players will become suspicious of at least three other people before they figure out who's really behind it all. They will become very attached to these suspicions and begin weaving complicated theories explaining how the evidence they have fits the suspect they want.

In other words, the big trick in designing a mystery scenario is to try to avoid a car wreck. Throwing red herrings into the mix is like boozing the players before putting them behind the wheel of the car.

COROLLARY: NOTHING IS FOOLPROOF

You've carefully laid out a scenario in which there are multiple paths to the solution with each step along each path supported by dozens of clues. You've even got a couple of proactive backup plans designed to get the PCs back on track if things should go awry.

Nothing could possibly go wrong!

... why do you even saying things like that?

The truth is that you are either a mouse or a man and, sooner or later, your plans are going to go awry. When that happens, you're going to want to be prepared for the possibility of spinning out new backup plans on the fly.

Here's a quote from an excellent essay by Ben Robbins:

I recommend this essay highly. It says pretty much everything I was planning to include in my discussion of this final corollary, so I'm not going to waste my time rephrasing something that's already been written so well. Instead, I'll satisfy myself by just quoting this piece of advice from it:

As we've discussed, one way to avoid this type of problem is to avoid having "one key hint" on which the adventure hinges. But the advice of "writing out your revelations ahead of time" is an excellent one. As Robbins says, this "should be a checklist or a trigger, not the whole explanation".

What I recommend is listing each conclusion you want the players to reach. Under each conclusion, list every clue that might lead them to that conclusion. (This can also serve as a good design checklist to make sure you've got enough clues supporting every conclusion.) As the PCs receive the clues, check them off. (This lets you see, at a glance, if there are areas where the PCs are missing too many clues.)

Finally, listen carefully to what the players are saying to each other. When they've actually reached a particular conclusion, you can check the whole conclusion off your list. (Be careful not to check it off as soon as they consider it as a possibility. Only check it off once they've actually concluded that it's true.)

If you see that too many clues for a conclusion are being missed, or that all the clues have been found but the players still haven't figured it out, then you'll know it's probably time to start thinking about new clues that can be worked into the adventure.

THE FINAL WORD

Basically, what all of this boils down to is simple: Plan multiple paths to success. Encourage player ingenuity. Give yourself a failsafe.

And remember the Three Clue Rule:

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I somehow managed to get through my entire essay on the Three Clue Rule without mentioning the adventure that first made me codify it: The Masks of Nyarlathotep.

Originally published in 1984, The Masks of Nyarlathotep is quite possibly the best-structured RPG campaign ever published. It chronicles the PCs' attempts to crush the many cults of Nyarlathotep, beginning in 1920s New York and then carrying them through London, Cairo, Kenya, Australia, and Shanghai.

But not necessarily in that order. Or any order at all, for that matter.

What makes the campaign memorable is not just the epic globetrotting, but the fact that the PCs were left entirely in control of their own destiny: Every location had a plethora of clues which could lead the PCs to any of the other locations, giving them free reign to pursue their investigations in any way that they chose.

In 1984, this structure was completely revolutionary. It still remains virtually unduplicated in its scope and flexibility.

I've never gotten a chance to actually run The Masks of Nyarlathotep. (Some day!) But the nascent promise of its design made a deep impression on me and continues to fundamentally shape the way I plan my campaigns.

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For example, finger of death is a a classic save-or-die spell: Either the target makes their saving throw or they die. A sleep spell is also a save-or-die effect, however, because if the target fails their saving throw they're knocked unconscious. On the other hand, a fireball spell is not a save-or-die effect: Although the damage from the spell might kill you, your death is not the direct result of a failed saving throw.

A save-or-die effect with practical results.

THE CONTINUUM OF SAVE-OR-DIE EFFECTS

As our examples suggest, there is actually a continuum of save-or-die effects -- ranging from the minor to the severe. In generic terms, I think this continuum can be defined this way:

(1) The effect takes the character out of play, but the character itself can take actions (usually additional saving throws) to put themselves back in play. For example, a hold person spell (which we'll talk about more later) paralyzes the target on a failed save, but allows the target to make a new save each round to recover.

(2) The effect takes the character out of play, but other characters can take trivial actions to put them back into play. For example, a sleep spell works like this -- another character can simply take an action to slap the character and wake them up.

(3) The effect takes the character out of play, but other characters can put them back in play if they have the right resources prepared. For example, any paralysis can be removed if you have a remove paralysis spell available.

(4) The effect kills the character.

It should also be noted that, beyond a certain point, the difference between the third and fourth categories becomes largely academic: A paralysis effect requires remove paralysis; a finger of death requires a resurrection. From a mechanical standpoint, at least, the difference is merely one of degree.

THE PROBLEM WITH SAVE-OR-DIE EFFECTS

Save-or-die effects are widely recognized as being one of the weak points in 3rd Edition. The basic problem with them can be summed up in three words: They aren't fun.

(1) They aren't fun to suffer.

(2) They aren't fun to use.

(3) They break down badly at higher levels of play.

Nobody likes to have bad things happen to their characters, but the truth is that -- no matter how much we might argue about hit points -- D&D combat is fun. It's stood the test of time for more than three decades now, and people are still enjoying it.

One of the things that's fun about it is the ablative nature of hit points -- the back-and-forth dynamic of dealing damage. You may not want to get caught in a fireball, but part of the excitement of playing the game is suffering that damage. I think everyone who has ever played the game has a story about the time that they managed to save the day while only having a single hit point left to their name. That's a story that captures the simple, pure fun that Gygax and Arneson captured in the D&D combat mechanics.

But save-or-die mechanics bypass the whole ablative damage system. As a result, when a save-or-die ability hits the table you are instantly stripping away all the tactical complexity of the combat system and reducing the entire thing to a craps game.

So when a save-or-die effect is used against a PC, it's no fun: On the basis of a single die roll, the player is no longer allowed to participate in the game. Imagine that, at the beginning of Monopoly, you had to roll 2d6 and -- if it came up snake eyes -- you automatically lost and didn't get to play that game. Doesn't sound like much fun, does it?

But it's equally true that using a save-or-die effect isn't particularly fun, either. Oh, sure, lots of people have stories about the time they killed an ancient red dragon with a single lucky hit from a finger of death. But while that's fun once or twice, how much fun is it in the long-term? Imagine that game of Monopoly again, only this time if you roll box cars on the 2d6 you automatically win the game. Still doesn't sound like much fun, does it?

And this leads to the breakdown at higher levels of play, where astronomical hit point totals and incredibly high saving throw bonuses turn combat into a giant game of: "Hey, who's going to roll a 1 on their saving throw first?"

THE CHEAPENING OF DEATH

I have an aesthetic problem with D&D in general: I dislike the revolving door of death. This is a problem I've talked about before, but it's one that has an impact on save-or-die effects at the gaming table.

Specifically, I don't like cheapening death. Therefore, I'm unlikely to use save-or-die effects on my PCs. But my players have no such compunction -- they're perfectly free to use those spells and effects against their opponents. As a result, this creates an imbalance of power.

This isn't strictly a mechanical problem, but it does highlight how a particular aesthetic desire can have a meaningful impact on game balance.

WotC's SOLUTION

As I mentioned, the problem with save-or-die effects has been well understood for several years now. The designers at Wizards of the Coast have been trying to deal with the issue since at least 2002 (when they released the Epic Level Handbook and discovered that the save-or-die effects were causing a complete meltdown in high level play).

With the release of D&D 3.5 in 2003, this newfound awareness translated into some rather half-hearted attempts at fixing the problem. Lots of save-or-die effects were still left scattered all over the core rulebooks, but some of the most problematic examples were fixed.

The solution they came up with was, basically, to weaken the save-or-die effect and move them down the continuum we talked about earlier. For example, in 3.0 hold person was a save-or-die effect of type #3: If you failed your save, you were paralyzed until either the spell ended or someone used a remove paralysis spell on you.

In 3.5, on the other hand, hold person was turned into a type #1 effect: If you became paralyzed, you could continue making saves every round until you succeeded (and stopped being paralyzed).

In 4th Edition, this remains their solution of choice. For example, in 3rd Edition a sleep spell was a save-or-die effect of type #2. In 4th Edition, if the spell successfully affects its target it only slows them. Only an additional failed save results in them falling asleep, and then they can continue making saving throws every round until they wake up.

Plus, in 4th Edition saving throws are always strict 50/50 affairs -- there are no modifiers. So you can quickly calculate that there's only a 50% chance a victim who has been affected by the spell will fall asleep at all; and only a 0.9% chance that they'd stay asleep for even 1 minute.

You can quickly see how watering down save-or-die effects remove most of their pernicious effects. There's only one problem, though: This watering down also tends to remove most of their utility and flavor, too.

This is part of a wider trend at WotC in which efforts to make the tactical combat portion of the game as perfectly balanced as possible cause them to offer up every other part of the game on a sacrificial altar.

A DIFFERENT SOLUTION

I think the wider problem with WotC's solution of choice is that it's basically like saying, "Man, this soup tastes like crap! I think I'll try adding some more water to it." The taste of crap is now a little less intense, but it's still crap.

The problem with save-or-die mechanics is that they bypass the ablative combat mechanics that work so well. So here's my thought: Instead of just watering these effects down, let's change the paradigm entirely and tie them into the ablative damage system.

The simplest solution is to simply have save-or-die effects deal ability score damage. For example, in my house rules all death effects deal 4d6 points of Constitution damage. If the spell has a secondary effect -- such as turning the victim into a pile of dust -- this effect only happens if the victim is killed by the Constitution damage. Similarly, you could have paralysis effects dealing Dexterity damage.

If I was completely overhauling the system, I would -- at the very least -- vary the amount of ability score damage depending on the power of the effect in question. For example, death effects might vary from 2d6 to 4d6 points of Con damage depending on whether you were talking about a 6th-level spell or a 9th-level spell.

But you can also get fancier: For example, if I were redesigning hold person I would make the spell deal 1d6 points of Dexterity damage per round until the victim made a successful save. If the victim is reduced to 0 Dex as a result of the spell, they are paralyzed (as the magical energies of the spell bind their limbs completely).

Similarly, a victim of a medusa's gaze would feel their limbs turning to stone as they medusa repeatedly inflicted them with 2d4 points of Dexterity damage.

Under this paradigm, there would be no need for a "paralysis" condition -- paralyzed creatures are simply those which have been reduced to 0 Dex. Similarly, a spell like remove paralysis would just be a quick way of healing Dexterity damage.

A sleep spell would be a mental assault, inflicting 1d4 points of Wisdom damage per round until the victim makes a save or drops into a magical coma. When the sleep spell wore off, this Wisdom damage -- like the damage from a ray of enfeeblement -- would be restored.

Since ability score damage no longer exists in 4th Edition, this solution won't work for that game. But if I end up making the switch, I'll be looking for some similar means to change the paradigm of save-or-die effects -- rather than just watering them down.

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THE HOLLOW - OPENING NIGHT FRIGHT

As I write this, I've just finished the opening weekend of The Hollow: Three performances down, ten to go.

For those of you unfamiliar with theater, the week before opening is typically known as tech week: This is when the technical elements of the show -- the lights, the music, the sound effects, and so forth -- are added. Obviously, this can also become an incredibly stressful time.

Fortunately, this was one of the good tech weeks: Everything was well-organized and ran smoothly.

Particularly fortunate, in fact, because I was rapidly falling apart at the seams.

On Tuesday I went to bed with a slight tickle at the back of my throat. When I woke up on Wednesday, this had become a painful sore throat. I immediately began treating it with cough syrup and spent the day in bed, but by the time I went in to rehearsal that night my muscles were aching and any hope that this was just going to be a 24 hour bug were rapidly fading.

By the time rehearsal ended on Wednesday, my voice was beginning to show signs of strain. This was bad news: An actor without his voice is just a mime. And nobody likes mimes.

But when Thursday dawned I was pretty hopeful: I was still sick, but I felt much better than I had the day before and my voice felt fine. Opening night was on Friday, so if I showed as much improvement over I'd be feeling close to 100%.

Thursday evening, however, became catastrophic. When I left home to go to rehearsal I was fine. By the time I got to rehearsal 20 minutes later, my voice was almost completely gone -- the only thing I had left was a sickly croak.

Now people were beginning to get worried looks on their faces whenever they heard me say anything. But I was still hopeful: Even if my voice had decided to take a vacation, I was still feeling much better. I had my fingers crossed that this was just the tail end of the illness and that I would wake up on the morrow completely rejuvenated.

... no such luck. When I woke up on Friday, my voice was only slightly improved. I spent the day dousing it with every medicine and home remedy I could think of, but by the time I was called for the show things were still not looking good. I had managed to resuscitate my voice, but it was pretty clear that it could collapse at any time.

And the real problem was the huge span of time in the middle of Act 2 when I don't leave the stage: I'm the Inspector in an Agatha Christie mystery. I'm the main character. I stay on stage and continue asking questions as other people cycle on and off the stage. All I do is talk. If my voice decides to become frog-like, not only am I screwed -- the entire production is screwed.

And, being opening night, the reviewers are of course in the house. So if things go down the drain, not only have I screwed up this performance -- I've potentially screwed us for the entire run of the show.

No pressure or anything, though!

By mid-afternoon I was hatching emergency plans: There was a drinks table onstage as part of the show. I contacted the stage manager and asked her to make sure there was extra water on the table so that I could improvise crossing to the drinks table and pouring myself a drink if I needed it.

Next up, I packed myself a voice-saving kit: I had cough drops. Bottled water. Cough syrup. Vitamin-C doses. I also pulled out a bottle of brandy and asked my girlfriend to pick me up a bottle of honey.

But I was absolutely terrified: There was simply no guarantee that any of this was going to work.

I arrived at the theater, checked in with Lydia, my wonderful stage manager. Touched base with the other actors who might be thrown or need to make minor adjustments to their own blocking to accommodate my crosses to the drinks table (although I had taken the trouble to identify specific moments when I could do this with minimal disruption). The rest of the cast -- bless them -- rallied around me with many good wishes (although I could still see the worry behind their eyes).

The thing that made the final difference, I think, is the warm brandy and honey. This is not healthy for your voice in the long-run, but in the short-term it will completely blast open your sinuses; warm your throat; and loosen your vocal cords. I dosed myself with a fresh shot before every entrance, and then -- during my long sequence of scenes -- I made two pit-stops by the drinks table to pick up a glass of water (and two more stops later in the play).

As plans go, this was not ideal. Opening night is not a good time to be losing your voice and improvising your lines while drunk.

But it worked.

There were a couple of times when I felt my voice right on the verge of breaking, but it never did. The next night I was able to pull it back to a single shot of brandy-and-honey and a single visit to the drinks table. On Sunday I brought the brandy just in case, but was able to skip it and make it through the show with just a single visit to the drinks table.

People who saw the show said they loved it, and those who didn't know about the catastrophe that was always one strained vocal cord away from sweeping us all away were shocked to hear me croaking in the lobby after the show.

And it was only after it was all done that I realized how desperately terrified I had been.

Fridays - Saturdays at 7:30pm
Sunday Matinees at 2:00pm
Pay What You Can Night - Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 7:30pm

Audio Described Performance - Sunday, May 18th at 2:00pm  

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So the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons is coming down the pike and people have recently been asking me what I think about it.

Well, I've written up some of my thoughts in the past. Those thoughts are largely unchanged: The design team at Wizards of the Coast has decided to design a really amazing tactical miniatures game. (Their motivation for doing so probably has more than a little to do with the reports that the D&D Miniatures game is the most profitable part of the D&D brand.) In order to design that game, however, they have apparently decided that:

(1) They are going to fundamentally alter the gameplay of D&D. (The short version: Yes, the game has changed considerably over the years. But playing a basic fighter in 3rd Edition was still basically the same thing as playing a fighter in 2nd Edition or a fighter in 1st Edition or a fighter in BECMI. Playing a wizard in 3rd Edition was still basically the same thing as playing a wizard in previous editions. And so forth.)

(2) It's not particularly necessary for them to actually make a roleplaying game. (Don't believe me? Go ahead and read my previous post on this. WotC's designers are on public record saying the only thing that matters in the game is what happens during combat.)

One of the most pernicious results of this design philosophy, in my opinion, is the prevalence of dissociated mechanics in 4th Edition.

When I talk about "dissociated mechanics", I'm talking about mechanics which have no association with the game world. These are mechanics for which the characters have no functional explanations.

Now, of course, all game mechanics are -- to varying degrees -- abstracted and metagamed. For example, the destructive power of a fireball spell is defined by the number of d6's you roll for damage; and the number of d6's you roll is determined by the caster level of the wizard casting the spell.

If you asked a character about d6's of damage or caster levels, they'd have no idea what you're talking about. But they could tell you what a fireball is and they could tell you that casters of greater skill can create more intense flames during the casting of the spell.

So a fireball spell has a direct association to the game world. What does a dissociated mechanic look like?

A SIMPLE EXAMPLE

Here's a sample power taken from one of the pregen characters used in the Keep on the Shadowfell preview adventure:

At first glance, this looks pretty innocuous: The rogue, through martial prowess, can force others to move where he wants them to move. Imagine Robin Hood shooting an arrow and causing someone to jump backwards; or a furious swashbuckling duel with a clever swordsman shifting the ground on which they fight. It's right there in the fluff text description: Through a series of feints and lures, you maneuver your foe right where you want him.

The problem  is that this is a Daily power -- which means it can only be used once per day by the rogue.

Huh? Why is Robin Hood losing his skill with the bow after using his skill with the bow? Since when did a swashbuckler have a limited number of feints that they can perform in a day?

There's a fundamental disconnect between what the mechanics are supposed to be modeling (the rogue's skill with a blade or a bow) and what the mechanics are actually doing.

If you're watching a football game, for example, and a player makes an amazing one-handed catch, you don't think to yourself: "Wow, they won't be able to do that again until tomorrow!"

And yet that's exactly the type of thing these mechanics are modeling. Unlike a fireball, I can't hold any kind of intelligible conversation with the rogue about his trick strike ability:

Continued tomorrow...

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Go to Part 1

This is a cheap shot.

Let's take a more complex example of the dissociated mechanics cropping up in 4th Edition: Marks.

The effect of placing a mark on another character depends on the mark you're using, but here are a couple of examples:

There are two levels on which these mechanics dissociate.

First, just like any other mechanic, the basic mark itself can be dissociated. Look at the war devil's besieged foe ability, for example: The war devil marks the target and the war devil's allies gain a +2 bonus to attack rolls made against the target.

Mechanically quite simple, but utterly dissociated from the game world. In point of fact, no explanation is given at all for what these mechanics represent in the game world.

Let's return to our example of the fireball spell again: If you're the DM and you want to describe what happens when a fireball spell goes off, you can easily give a description of what the character sees. A wizard casts the spell, a bead of fire shoots out of his fingertip, and then explodes into a ball of flame.

But if you're talking about this besieged foe ability, what would the DM describe? What is the war devil actually doing when it marks an opponent? What happens that causes the war devil's allies to gain the +2 bonus to attack rolls? Is it affecting the target or is it affecting the allies?

(The name of the ability, of course, gives you no guidance here at all. The use of the term "besieged" would imply that the target is being overwhelmed by multiple opponents... but there's no such requirement in the actual ability. In fact, the war devil doesn't have to be anywhere near the target and the bonuses apply even if there's only one guy whacking on the target.)

EXPLAINING IT ALL AWAY

Of course the argument can be made that such explanations can be trivially made up: A ruby beam of light shoots out of the war devil's head and strikes their target, afflicting them with a black blight. The war devil shouts horrific commands in demonic tongues to his allies, unnaturally spurring them into a frenzied bloodlust. The war devil utters a primeval curse.

These all sound pretty awesome, so what's the problem? The problem is that every single one of these is a house rule. If it's a ruby beam of light, can it be blocked by a pane of glass or a transparent wall of force? If it's a shouted command, shouldn't it be prevented by a silence spell? If it's a curse, can it be affected by a remove curse spell?

And even if you manage to craft an explanation which doesn't run afoul of mechanical questions like these, there are still logical questions to be answered in the game world. For example, is it an ability that the war devil can use without the target becoming aware of them? If the target does become aware of them, can they pinpoint the war devil's location based on its use of the ability? Do the war devil's allies need to be aware of the war devil in order to gain the bonus?

If the mechanic wasn't fundamentally dissociated -- if there was an explanation of what the mechanic was actually modeling in the game world -- the answers to these questions would be immediately apparent. And if you're slapping on fluff text in order to answer these questions, the answers will be different depending on the fluff text you apply -- and that makes the fluff text a house rule.

(Why would you want to answer these types of questions? Well, some trivial possibilities would include: The war devil has used magic to disguise himself as an ally of the PCs. The war devil is invisible. The war devil is hiding in the supernatural shadows behind the Throne of Doom and doesn't want to reveal himself... yet.)

THE PROBLEM WITH HOUSE RULES

So now we've established that any attempt to provide an explanation for this mechanic constitutes a house rule: Whatever explanation you come up with will have a meaningful impact on how the ability is used in the game. Why is this a problem?

First, there's a matter of principle. Once we've accepted that you need to immediately house rule the war devil in order to use the war devil, we've accepted that the game designers gave us busted rules that need to be fixed before they can be used. The Rule 0 Fallacy ("this rule isn't broken because I can fix it") is a poor defense for any game.

But there's also a practical problem: Yes, fixing the war devil's besieged foe ability is relatively easy. But these types of dissociated abilities have been scattered liberally through the 4th Edition promo material we've seen. We can safely assume that they'll be similarly found throughout the core rulebooks. This means that there will be hundreds of them. As supplements come out, there will probably be thousands of them.

And every single one of them will need to be house ruled before you can use them.

Now you've got hundreds (or thousands) of house rules to create, keep track of, and use consistently. Even if this is trivial for any one of them, it becomes a huge problem in bulk.

These massive house rules also create a disjunction in the game. One of the things that was identified as problematic in the waning days of AD&D was that the vast majority of people playing the game had heavily house ruled the game in various ways. That meant that when you switched from one AD&D group to a different AD&D group, you could often end up playing what was essentially a completely different game.

In the case of AD&D, this widespread house ruling was the result of disaffection with a fundamentally weak and inconsistent game system. House ruling, of course, didn't disappear with the release of 3rd Edition -- but the amount of house ruling, in general, was significantly decreased and the consistency of experience from one game table to the next was improved.

But now we have a 4th Edition which, due to its dissociated design principles, requires you to create hundreds (or thousands) of house rules. And, of course, as soon as you switch game tables all of those house rules will change.

ACCEPTING YOUR FATE

Of course, you can sidestep all these issues with house rules if you just embrace the design ethos of 4th Edition: There is no explanation for the besieged foe ability. It is a mechanical manipulation with no corresponding reality in the game world whatsoever.

At that point, however, you're no longer playing a roleplaying game. When the characters' relationship to the game world is stripped away, they are no longer roles to be played. They have become nothing more than mechanical artifacts that are manipulated with other mechanical artifacts.

You might have a very good improv session that is vaguely based on the dissociated mechanics that you're using, but there has been a fundamental disconnect between the game and the world -- and when that happens, it stop being a roleplaying game. You could just as easily be playing a game of Chess while improvising a vaguely related story about a royal coup starring your character named Rook.

In short, you can simply accept that 4th Edition is being designed primarily as a tactical miniatures game. And if it happens to still end up looking vaguely like a roleplaying game, that's entirely accidental.

Continued tomorrow...

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Go to Part 1

Yesterday I talked about marks in 4th Edition, focusing particularly on how one particular mark -- the war devil's besieged foe ability -- was dissociated and the problems that dissociation causes in terms of game design.

Today I'm going to talk about the dissociation of the marking mechanics in general. To understand the problem, let's start by looking at the marked condition in 4th Edition:

The problem with this rule is that it forces an association between two mechanics where it wouldn't otherwise exist.

Let's look at three of the marks I listed yesterday: The warpriest's challenge; the paladin's divine challenge; and the fighter's challenge.

The warpriest's challenge allows them to take a free attack on the marked target if the marked target moves away or tries to attack somebody else. The fighter's challenge causes the target to suffer a -2 penalty if they attack anyone other than the fighter. The paladin's divine challenge is a magical compulsion that similarly causes the target to suffer a -2 penalty if they attack anyone other than the paladin and also deals damage if they do so.

Individually, all of these abilities can be explained: The warpriest issues a challenge and pays particular attention to one target. If the target doesn't pay attention to the warpriest, the warpriest can take advantage of that and make a free attack.

The fighter uses his martial prowess to engage with someone, using his own attacks to distract them and interfere with their ability to attack other characters.

The paladin uses their connection with the divine to create a magical compulsion, forcing the target to either attack them or face the consequences.

The dissociation happens when these abilities start affecting each other. Take a simple sequence like this one:

- The fighter puts their mark on an opponent.

- The paladin puts their mark on the same opponent, causing the fighter's mark to come to an end.

Imagine trying to explain what happened there to the characters involved. It's impossible. There's no reason why the paladin's magical compulsion should prevent the fighter from using their martial skills to interfere with an enemy's ability to attack their allies. It makes even less sense for the fighter's martial skills to somehow dispel the magical compulsion. Yet this is what the marking mechanics say.

Why are the mechanics like this? Primarily game balance. Imagine two paladins coming up and both laying down a divine challenge on a single opponent. Now, no matter who this opponent attacks, they'll be suffering at least 8 points of radiant damage each round. And if they attack anyone other than the paladins, they'll be suffering 16 points of radiant damage each round.

Similarly, take the war devil's besieged foe ability (granting their allies a +2 bonus to attacks against that opponent). Now, imagine an encounter with 6 war devils all dumping this mark on the same character. Suddenly all of the war devils have a +12 attack bonus against their chosen opponent.

This type of synergistic stacking is an issue and needs to be dealt with. In 3rd Edition, for example, the same ability wouldn't stack with itself and bonuses or penalties of the same type wouldn't stack with each other, either.

Another solution to this problem, however, would be to make it so that the ill-effects of a mark could be avoided as long as you targeted any of the characters currently marking you. Of course, this still leads to dissociation -- if the paladin places a magical compulsion on me that requires me to attack the paladin, why does the fighter's fancy footwork negate that?

Plus, the other reason the mechanics work like this is an effort to minimize complexity: There are apparently going to be lots and lots of marks in the game, and by limiting them so that only one mark can be in effect on a creature at a time you limit the amount of bookkeeping that needs to be done.

But all of this demonstrates that, at a fundamental level, 4th Edition is completely dissociated. The only way the PCs could possibly understand why their abilities interact with each other in this fashion is if they understand that they're actually just characters in a roleplaying game suffering the consequences of the marking mechanic.

Breaking the fourth wall in Order of the Stick is pretty funny, but do we really need to turn D&D into a punchline?

Continued tomorrow...

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Over the past few days I've been describing all the ways in which dissociated mechanics suck for a roleplaying game and why I dislike the fact that 4th Edition is using them.

However, dissociated mechanics can also be quite useful for roleplaying games. It's all a question of what you do with them. Specifically, dissociated mechanics can be useful if the reason they're dissociated from the game world is because they're modeling the narrative.

This can be a little bit tricky to understand, so let's break it down and then look at some examples.

ROLEPLAYING vs. STORYTELLING

There's another long discussion that can be had about stances and goals that a player can have while playing an RPG, but I'm going to simplify things a bit for the purposes of this discussion and talk about just two broad approaches:

First, you can play a role. In this approach you get inside your character's head and figure out what they would do.

Second, you can create a story. In this approach you are focusing on the creation of a compelling narrative.

The division between these two approaches can get pretty muddy. Not only because people can switch, mix, and blend the two approaches in various ways, but also because we have a natural desire to turn sequences of events into narratives: If someone asks us about our day, we'll tell a story about it. Similarly, even if we approach the game by playing a role, the events that happen to our character will be almost immediately transformed into a narrative of those events.

The difference between the two lies not in describing the result of what happened (which will always be a story), but with the approach by which you decided what would happen. Another way to think of it, perhaps, is to consider the difference between an actor (who plays a character) and an author (who writes a story).

Since this is probably still confusing, let's break out an example.

SCENE-BASED RESOLUTION

Traditional roleplaying games, like D&D, are based around the idea of players as actors: Each player takes on the role of a particular character and the entirety of play is defined around the player thinking of themselves as the character and asking the question, "What am I going to do?"

Because of this, resolution mechanics in traditional RPGs are action-based. In other words, the resolution mechanics determine the success-or-failure of a specific action. The player says, "I want to do X." The resolution mechanics determine whether or not the player is successful. Can I climb that wall? How far can I jump? Will that gunshot wound kill me?

But there is another option: Instead of determining the outcome of a particular action, scene-based resolution mechanics determine the outcome of entire scenes.

For example, in Wushu players describe the actions of their characters. These descriptions are always true. Instead of saying, "I try to hit the samurai", for example, you would say: "I leap into the air, drawing my swords in a single fluid motion, parrying the samurai's sword as I pass above his head, and land behind him."

Then you roll a pool of d6's, with the number of dice being determined by the number of details you put into your description. For example, in this case you would roll 4 dice: "I leap into the air (1), drawing my swords in a single fluid motion (2), parrying the samurai's sword as I pass above his head (3), and land behind him (4)."

Based on Wushu's mechanics, you then count the number of successes you score on the dice you rolled and apply those successes towards the total number of successes required to control the outcome of the scene. If you gather enough successes, you determine how the scene ends.

In practice, it's more complicated than that. But that's the essential core of what's happening.

BENEFITS OF DISSOCIATION

Clearly, a scene-based resolution mechanic is dissociated from the game world. The game world, after all, knows nothing about the "scene". In the case of Wushu, for example, you can end up defeating the samurai just as easily by carefully detailing a tea ceremony as by engaging in flashy swordplay. The dice you're rolling have little or no connection to the game world -- they're modeling a purely narrative property (control of the scene).

The disadvantage of a dissociated mechanic, as we've established, is that it disengages the player from the role they're playing. But in the case of a scene-based resolution mechanic, the dissociation is actually just making the player engage with their role in a different way (through the narrative instead of through the game world).

The advantage of a mechanic like Wushu's is that it gives greater narrative control to the player. This narrative control can then be used in all sorts of advantageous ways. For example, in the case of Wushu these mechanics were designed to encourage dynamic, over-the-top action sequences: Since it's just as easy to slide dramatically under a car and emerge on the other side with guns blazing as it is to duck behind cover and lay down suppressing fire, the mechanics make it possible for the players to do whatever the coolest thing they can possibly think of is (without worrying about whether or not the awesomeness they're imagining will make it too difficult for their character to pull it off).

Is this style of play for everybody? No.

Personally, I tend to think of it as a matter of trade-offs: There are advantages to focusing on a single role like an actor and there are advantages to focusing on creating awesome stories like an author. Which mechanics I prefer for a given project will depend on what my goals are for that project.

TRADE-OFFS

And it's important to understand that everything we're talking about is about trade-offs.

In the case of Wushu, fidelity to the game world is being traded off in favor of narrative control. In the case of 4th Edition, fidelity to the game world is being traded off in favor of a tactical miniatures game.

So why can I see the benefit of the Wushu-style trade-off, but am deeply dissatisfied by the trade-offs 4th Edition is making?

Well, the easiest comeback would be to say that it's all a matter of personal taste: I like telling stories and I like playing a role, but I don't like the tactical wargaming.

That's an easy comeback, but it doesn't quite ring true. One of things I like about 3rd Edition is the tactical combat system. And I generally prefer games with lots of mechanically interesting rules. I like the game of roleplaying games.

My problem with the trade-offs of 4th Edition is that I also like the roleplaying of roleplaying games. It comes back to something I said before: Simulationist mechanics allow me to engage with the character through the game world. Narrative mechanics allow me to engage with the character through the story.

Games are fun. But games don't require roles. There is a meaningful difference between an RPG and a wargame. And that meaningful difference doesn't actually go away just because you happen to give names to the miniatures you're playing the wargame with and improv dramatically interesting stories that take place between your tactical skirmishes.

To put it another way: I can understand why you need to accept the disadvantages of dissociated mechanics in order to embrace the advantages of narrative-based mechanics. But I don't think it's necessary to embrace dissociated mechanics in order to create a mechanically interesting game. There have been lots of mechanically interesting roleplaying games which haven't embraced dissociated mechanics.

In other words, I don't think the trade-offs in 4th Edition are necessary. They're sacrificing value and utility where value and utility didn't need to be lost.

Continued tomorrow...

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Yesterday I talked about the potential advantages of using dissociated mechanics to achieve certain goals and proffered the example of scene-based resolution mechanics.

4th Edition is, apparently, going to offer a scene-based resolution mechanic in the form of skill challenges. Since I like scene-based resolution mechanics, I must be OK with 4th Edition's skill challenges, right?

Well, not exactly.

(DISCLAIMER: This essay is based entirely around the pre-release details of 4th Edition which have been posted to WotC's website or otherwise revealed to the public. In the case of the previous examples I've discussed, I'm pretty secure in my belief that the aspects of the system I've been talking about will still be there in the core rulebooks. However, in the specific case of skill challenges it is certainly possible that some of the problems I discuss here will be resolved by additional details in the core rulebooks. However, based on what I've read, I consider that unlikely.)

The important thing to understand is that I'm not just OK with scene-based resolution mechanics for the sake of scene-based resolution mechanics. I like certain scene-based mechanics specifically because they offer greater narrative control to the players (and the benefits that come with that).

(This is actually a fairly general principle: Just because I like a system that involves rolling dice, you shouldn't conclude that I'm going to instantly love all dice-based mechanics.)

But in the case of 4th Edition's skill challenge mechanics, it looks like we're swallowing all the disadvantages of the scene-based mechanic's dissociation without getting any meaningful benefits from it. 

HOW THEY WORK

The core of the skill challenge mechanic in 4th Edition is, essentially, a complex skill check: You have to earn X number of successes before suffering Y number of failures. (For example, in a 4/2 skill challenge you would need to make 4 successful skill checks before failing 2 skill checks in order to succeed at the skill challenge.)

The difference between a skill challenge and a complex skill check, however, is that a skill challenge allows the players to use many different skills. You can read a sample skill challenge at Wizard's website. In this example the PCs are trying to convince a duke to aid them in their quest, and they can make Bluff, Diplomacy, Insight, and History skill checks in order to earn the 8 successes they need to pass the skill challenge.

THE BASIC DISSOCIATION

The basic dissociation of the skill challenge mechanics lie in their nature as scene-based mechanics. Because they still use skill checks, this can be a little more masked than it was in the case of the Wushu example we looked at before, but the dissociation is still there.

Basically, the skill challenge mechanics don't care what the PCs are doing -- they only care how much the PCs have done. This basic mechanical dissociation manifests itself in several ways:

(1) The skill challenge can report guaranteed failure even though failure has not been guaranteed. This is because it's quite trivial to imagine skill checks which might help the PCs accomplish a particular task without actually harming their efforts if they fail them. In WotC's sample, for example, an Insight check will allow the PCs to recognize that using the Intimidate skill will result in an automatic failure.

But what if the PCs fail that Insight check and that results in the failure of the skill challenge? How do you explain that?

You can't. It would certainly make sense for the failure of that check to potentially lead to failure (if the PCs subsequently attempt to Intimidate the duke) -- but if they never do that, then the failure should be irrelevant, not a deal-breaker.

(2) For largely the same reasons, the skill challenge can also report guaranteed success even though success has not been guaranteed.

For example, imagine a skill challenge in which the goal is to get inside a castle. There are several possible solutions the PCs could pursue: They could climb the walls. They could bribe the guards. They could unlock the back door. They could seek to gain an audience with someone inside the castle. They could dig a tunnel under the walls.

The DM decides to define this as a 4/2 challenge.

But now imagine that the PCs spend a good deal of time researching this problem: They make a History check to check up on historical attempts to break into the castle. They make an Architecture check to see if they can find any hidden entrances. They do a Gather Information check to see if they can find any blackmail material on the guards. They do a Diplomacy check to find out who they might be able to get an audience with.

These are all useful skill checks and there's no good reason why the DM should veto any of them. But if they succeed at all of them, then they've achieved their four successes and the skill challenge system is reporting that they've succeeded... even though they still aren't inside the castle.

(3) And, on top of that, the skill challenge mechanics can also fail to report success even though you've already done everything required for success.

Continued tomorrow...

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RAILROADING

All of the dissociations of the skill challenge mechanics arise because, for any given problem, there are multiple possible solutions. It is likely that each of these solutions will require a different set of skills.

For example, if you wanted to solve our "get into the castle" problem you could try:

(1) Diplomacy (to bribe the guards)

(2) Gather Information (to find out who works in the castle) and Diplomacy (to get an audience)

(3) Stealth (to reach the walls) and Climb (the walls)

(4) Architecture (to find out about the secret door), Stealth (to reach the door), and Thievery (to pick the lock on the door)

So here we see four possible solutions, involving completely different skill checks: 1, 2, 2, and 3.

If the DM sets the skill challenge to be 2/1 then the skill challenge mechanics will fail to report success despite success being achieved in one case and report success before success has been achieved in another.

Similarly, in the case of the fourth scenario a failed Architecture check would seem to bollox the entire effort and the skill challenge mechanics would seem to accurately report that. Of course, this is entirely acccidental... and not accurate, either. As we can see, even though solution #4 is no longer an option, the other three options haven't become impossible just because of the failed Architecture check.

One way to solve these problems is to simply design the skill challenges so that they're railroads. This, based on their web sample, is WotC's solution: Instead of merely setting a goal ("get the duke to help us"), their skill challenge specifically tells the players how they will achieve it ("by getting the duke to trust you").

Explaining why railroading is a Bad Idea(TM) is beyond the scope of this essay. But it's a Bad Idea(TM).

RULE 0 FALLACY

You can also work around some of these problems by invoking the Rule 0 Fallacy ("this rule isn't broken because I can fix it"). In this case, when the system is inappropriately reporting failure or success, the DM should simply ignore it.

But if the mechanics are so broken that we need to frequently ignore them, why are we using them at all?

UNFUN WITH PROBABILITY

You can also try to remove dissociations from the system by varying the number of skill checks you require to accomplish a particular task.

For example, let's consider our castle break-in skill challenge again. Let's say that the DM sets it as a 4/2 challenge and the PC decide to sneak up to the walls and then climb over them. The DM has them make a Stealth check (1 success) and then requires the PC to make 3 successful Climb checks. If the PC has a 50/50 shot of making the Climb check, then they only have a 12.5% chance of climbing the wall.

Now, let's change the scenario: One of the PCs decides to distract the guards with a Diplomacy check while another PC sneaks up to the walls with a Stealth check and tries to climb them with a Climb check. The DM has them make the Diplomacy check (1 success) and the Stealth check (1 success) and then requires the PC to make 2 successful Climb checks. With the same 50/50 shot on any given Climb check, the PC now has a 25% chance of climbing the wall.

For some reason, talking to the guard has made the wall easier to climb!

You see similar probability artifacts arising out of the skill challenge system even if you aren't padding the number of required checks in order to fulfill the arbitrary requirements of the dissociated mechanics.

For example, if you get to the point where you just have to make a single Climb check in order to succeed at the skill challenge, the difficulty of successfully climbing the wall will depend on how many failures you've accumulated getting to that point.

If it was a 4/2 challenge and somebody in the group failed on that Architecture check to see if they could find out about a secret door, then you've only got one shot at it: If you fail the Climb check, you'll have accumulated two failures and the skill challenge will fail. With a 50/50 shot, you only have a 50% chance of climbing the wall.

But if your group never considered attempting that Architecture check, you've still got a failure to burn. If you fail the first Climb check, you'll only have a single failure and will be able to try again. With a 50/50 shot, you now have a 75% chance of climbing the wall.

You'll note that, in both of these cases, the scenario is identical: The PCs are unaware of the secret door (either because they never thought to look for it or because they didn't find it). But in one scenario they have a 50% chance of climbing the wall and in the other they have a 75% chance of climbing the wall. Why? Because of a mechanical artifact that has absolutely nothing to do with the game world.

That's the definition of a dissociated mechanic. 

Some would argue that this type of probability shift is irrelevant because the PCs will only go through the skill challenge once: Either the wall is a 50% wall or it's a 75% wall for them, it's not both. But this sophistry ignores the possibility that this same wall can end up being part of many different skill challenges for the same set of PCs.

And do we even need to discuss why it's ridiculous for a wall to become unclimbable by everyone in the group just because the guy with the lowest Climb bonus failed his check?

THE BIG PROBLEM

Okay, so we've established that the skill challenge mechanics are dissociated. Why is that a problem?

Because, unlike the Wushu mechanics, the skill challenge mechanics don't seem to actually be accomplishing much. You're making all the sacrifices inherent in the use of dissociated mechanics, but you aren't gaining anything in return. 

Most notably, the skill challenge mechanics aren't giving the players any meaningful narrative control. The flow of gameplay is unchanged. In 3rd Edition, for example, gameplay looked like this:

(1) The DM describes a problem.

(2) The players propose possible solutions.

(3) The DM determines whether the solutions will actually work and asks the players to make the appropriate skill checks to resolve them.

With the 4th Edition skill challenge mechanics, gameplay will look like this:

(1) The DM describes a problem.

(2) The players propose possible solutions.

(3) The DM determines whether the solutions will work and asks the players to make the appropriate skill checks to resolve them.

Nothing has changed.

The only concrete benefit of the skill challenge mechanics, as far as I can tell, is that they codify a way for rewarding XP for overcoming challenges. This doesn't even begin to justify the problems that come with dissociated mechanics, in my opinion.

It takes some real effort to find those Worst of Both Worlds solutions. WotC seems to have really nailed it with the skill challenge mechanics.

On the other hand, you could certainly adopt a system very similar to WotC's skill challenge system and use it to pass a lot of narrative control into the hands of the PCs. I'm not personally convinced that mixing that type of player-driven narrative control with a combat system that doesn't even begin to feature player-driven narrative control will make for a particularly effective game (it sounds more like mixing oil and water to me), but it's certainly not a bad idea to experiment with.

THE OTHER PROBLEM

Since I'm discussing skill challenges, I might as well mention the other major problem they seem to have: From what we've seen so far, the skill challenge system can't handle any inputs which aren't skills.

For example, what happens if I cast a fly spell instead of using a Climb check to climb over a wall? Should that count as a success for the skill challenge? Multiple successes? Or does the fact that I'm flying mean that I now have to make an extra skill check somewhere else? And doesn't that create yet another weird, dissociated disconnect between the mechanics and the game world -- encouraging me, as it does, to potentially climb a wall and make a Climb check even though I'm wearing boots of flying?

Continued tomorrow...

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4th EDITION: DISSOCIATED MECHANICS

Go to Part 1

Okay, I'm almost done ranting about dissociated mechanics. This is the last post in this sequence.

But before I signed off on the subject, I did want to briefly discuss one area where I think the basic structure of a skill challenge works very well: Social encounters.

One of the reasons they work well is that human behavior is not easily quantifiable. If, all things being equal, a wall is harder to climb one day than the next, that's inexplicable. If, on the other hand, I'm happy to take the garbage out one day and then get snippy with my girlfriend when she asks me to do it the next day... well, I'm just being grouchy.

In other words, the inherent dissociation of the mechanics gets lost in the chaotic intricacies of human relationships. In fact, things like the probability skewing we were talking about can actually end up being features instead of bugs when you're dealing with social scenarios.

Of course, you'd want to sidestep the railroading WotC demonstrates in their own sample skill challenge. But once you've done that, even the basic skill challenge mechanics we've seen for 4th Edition offer a more robust -- if still fairly simplistic -- improv structure that is preferable to a situation in which the group is either left rudderless or in which the DM boils the whole thing down into a single opposed roll.

Ideally, however, I'd want to make the system more robust, dynamic, and responsive. A few ideas:

(1) Good guidelines for determining the degree of the skill challenge (how many successes) and the difficulty of the skill challenge (ratio of failures). Are the relationship and risk-vs-reward scales that I use for my current Diplomacy rules a starting point for such guidelines?

(2) Opposition. NPCs who are actively working against the PCs. Their successes count as failures for the PCs, but their successes can also be undone.

(3) Obstacles. These are tools for modeling more dynamic situations. For example, the main challenge might be 8/4 -- but before you can start tackling that main problem, you first have to overcome a 2/3 obstacle or a 6/3 obstacle. (It might be interesting to define opposition as a specific kind of obstacle: You could eliminate the opposition entirely by overcoming the obstacle, or just deal with them complicating matters as you focus on the main challenge.)

(4) Tactics. These might also be thought of as templates or tactics. I'd be drawing generic inspiration from some of the material in Penumbra's Dynasties & Demagogues (among other sources).

Over the past few years there has been an increasing move towards trying to figure out "social combat" mechanics in RPGs -- with the general idea being that you're bringing the robustness of combat mechanics to roleplaying encounters. In my experience, however, most of these systems end up categorizing all social interaction as a form of warfare. This has limited truth to it. And even when it is true, it usually ends up being a gross over-simplification.

In the ideas of social challenge mechanics, on the other hand, I find the nascent promise of a mechanically interesting system for handling social encounters that doesn't try to ape combat mechanics.

I'm hopeful that something interesting might come out of this. If it does, you guys will be the first to know. (There's also a part of me still hoping that I'm wrong about 4th Edition's skill challenges and that the core rulebooks will, in fact, unveil something far more impressive than the lame and crippled examples they've proffered to date.)

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I'm not very good at publicity.

I'd like to say that this is because I'm a humble man. But I suspect the truth is that I'm egotistical enough that I believe everyone should recognize my brilliance without me having to tell them about it. (I kid... or do I?)

Seriously, though, the reality is that I just don't like dealing with bureaucracy, busywork, or paperwork. Publicity lies somewhere in the interstice between the three, and if I can figure out some way to procrastinate it, then I'll end up procrastinating it.

This is why Hervé Jeune had to spend about 5 years trying to get me to send him a biography so that he could put it up on the Guide du roliste, a French roleplaying/gaming site. I'm not even exaggerating when I say that: Every 45 days he would send me an e-mail like clockwork, asking me very politely to send him a biography. And every time I got the e-mail I would dutifully think to myself, "Yup, I should definitely do that."

And then it would sit in my Inbox until it would expire and disappear (Hervé had the AOL address I've had for a decade and a half). And then, a few days later, the new e-mail would pop up and I would think, "Yup, I should definitely do that."

Well, several months ago I finally got around to doing it. A couple of weeks later, Hervé sent me an e-mail telling me that the whole thing had been translated and that it could be found here. I can't read a word of it, but it looks pretty nifty. In fact, the whole site looks nifty.

Of course, Hervé sent me that e-mail more than two months ago and I'm only getting around to mentioning it here on the site now.

Which, I suppose, goes to show that I'm no better about publicity now than I've ever been.

Ah well...

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The Hollow runs Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through June 1st. But I've already started work on my next project: From June 28th through August 3rd of this year, I'll be appearing with Shakespeare & Company as Bolingbrooke in Richard II and as Oliver du Boys in As You Like It. (The company is also producing Servant of Two Masters.)

These shows run in repertory, and this'll be my first experience with that. I'm looking forward to it. I'm also looking forward to taking a large bite out of Shakespeare. Working with his words and his characters is a pure joy.

Lucas Gerstner is playing the title role in Richard II and Orlando in As You Like It.

Lucas and I first worked together earlier this year in Henry V at Theater in the Round: He played the Duke of Orleans and I played the Constable of France.

We're currently working together on The Hollow: I'm playing Inspector Colquhoun and he plays Edward Angkatell -- one of the suspects.

As Lucas puts it, our theatrical career together seems to be deteriorating: We started out on the same team. Then I suspected him of murder. Now I'm trying to kill him. Twice.

I figured that it could only go uphill from here. But then I realized there was always the chance that I could end up directing him in a production of Sartre's No Exit and literally send him to hell.

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As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to be playing Oliver du Boys in As You Like It this summer with Shakespeare & Company. This will actually be the second time I've appeared in a production of As You Like It, the first being my inaugural show in college during the University of Minnesota's 1999-2000 season.

This leads to an interesting story:

Cast lists for the University of Minnesota were posted on a bulletin board in the basement of the theater building. Wendy Knox, the director of As You Like It, had chosen to list the roles in alphabetical order by the actor's last name. My name, of course, appeared right at or near the top of the list. So I almost immediately spotted it:

JUSTIN ALEXANDER - JACQUES DU BOYS 

My heart leapt for joy. This was going to be my first show in college.

While I had seen a couple productions of the play before, it had been several years and I had never been particularly familiar with it. So I headed home, grabbed my copy of the Complete Works, flipped it open to As You Like It, and began to read -- eager to see what my role was.

It was only a couple of scenes before I saw my cue: Enter Jacques.

As I read I got more and more excited. Jacques is a major character in the play. Among other things, he says the famous lines about "the seven ages of man". This was going to be awesome.

I continued reading. And then, on literally the second-to-last page of the play, I read another stage direction: Enter Jacques du Boys.

Yup. A completely different character also named Jacques.

Now, Jacques du Boy gets a nice, meaty monologue. It's a lengthy piece that basically ends the play. It's a nifty little part. Plus, I ended up getting a variety of other lines for characters like "First Lord" to pad it out a bit. But Jacques du Boys sure as heck isn't Jacques.

Okay, fast forward eight years. I get a voice message from Shakespeare & Company offering me two roles: Bolingbrooke in Richard II (Richard's nemesis and the guy who becomes Henry IV) and "Oliver in As You Like It".

Hey! I already know this one! Oliver du Boys is the elder brother of Orlando, the main character character in the play. (He's also the older brother of Jacques du Boys -- who really shouldn't be confused with Jacques.) Oliver is a fun little villain who tries to kill Orlando and, thus, kick-starts the entire play. He's going to be a lot of fun.

So I pull out my Complete Works again and flip it open to As You Like It. I glance at the cast list, and what do I see?

SIR OLIVER MARTEXT

... you have gotta be kidding me.

Sir Oliver Martext is the name of the priest who comes on at the end of the play and performs some marriages. (Does saying that there are marriages at the end of a Shakespearean comedy constitute a spoiler?) He has a grand total of three lines. He is so totally inconsequential that I didn't even know who he was and I had been in the play before.

Surely this couldn't be happening again... could it?

Nah. It wasn't. I'm playing Oliver du Boys. (Which, coincidentally, means that I'm making my way through the du Boys brothers. I figure the next time I'm in As You Like It that I'll be a shoe-in for Orlando.) But I find it amusing nonetheless.

And, seriously, what was Shakespeare thinking? Why do all of these characters have the same first name?

I figure it's personal. Shakespeare's just fucking with me. I must've done something to piss him off and now he's holding a grudge against me. I'm like Rob Paravonian, only instead of Pachelbel, the du Boys boys are my personal cross to bear.

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As it turned out, of course, George W. Bush ended up being the Republican nominee. Bush wore his ignorance and incompetence on his sleeve and came pre-packaged with a long history of dismal failure. I knew he would be a complete disaster for this country and voting for Al Gore became a no-brainer. The Stakes were far too high.

In any case, eight years ago I was ready to embrace a John McCain presidency. I didn't agree completely with his politics, but I respected his principles, his intelligence, and his integrity.

But eight years has made a huge difference: Today I am vehemently opposed to a John McCain presidency. Why?

Well, here's one reason:

At some point during or after losing the Republican primary in 2000, John McCain made the decision that he would do whatever was necessary in order to secure his party's nomination in 2008. He became a political panderer and utterly sacrificed his personal integrity on the altar of personal ambition.

But more importantly, John McCain lost his moral compass during the past eight years. Frankly, John McCain lost my vote (and my respect) when he condoned torture. Repeatedly. John McCain -- a former POW -- should know better. And he should be ashamed to compromise his own ethical code in order to achieve his political aspirations.

(For the record, McCain loses a little more of my respect every time he tries to defend his pro-torture vote in February 2008 by pointing to the position he took vis-a-vis torture in 2005... which is when he first flip-flopped on the issue. Saying, "I didn't flip-flop on torture because I flip-flopped on torture in 2005," is, frankly, insulting to every intelligent and informed person.)

All of this was more than enough to turn me against the idea of a John McCain presidency. But recently even more disturbing news is beginning to break: John McCain's campaign has a corruption problem. Lots of corruption problems. He's also shown a remarkable willingness to break and/or bend the very campaign finance laws he personally championed.

Apparently I shouldn't have been so quick to give him a second chance after his involvement as one of the Keating Five.

Why is this important? Because the Republican party has a serious problem with corruption and cronyism. At a national level it's not hard to draw a line from Nixon (a name which has practically become a byword for corruption) to Reagan (the White House featuring the most criminal convictions in history) to Bush. But the congressional Republicans have been plagued by their own scandals (Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, Duke Cunningham); as have Republican governors (Coingate, George Ryan, Ernie Fletcher, John G. Rowland). In short, their corruption is rampant at every level of government: National, state, and local. Heck, the Republicans even steal from themselves.

So when John McCain not only establishes that he's willing to compromise his own ethical integrity in order to achieve political power but also appears to engage in widespread, systematic corruption... well, that makes it impossible for me to support him for any political office. Nor can I have any faith in his ability to lead this country out of the troubled times that George W. Bush has left us stranded in.

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For several months now my plan for 4th Edition has been to run the preview adventure -- Keep on the Shadowfell -- for my regular D&D group. My goal is to approach that experience with a completely open mind, see how it goes, and then use it to decide whether or not to spend the money on the core rulebooks. My current campaign, set in Ptolus, would stay 3rd Edition in any case. But if 4th Edition convinces me to make switch, then I'd probably use it for my next campaign.

A couple of days ago my copy of the module arrived from Amazon. I've now read through it, and have a few thoughts to share. So, on that note...

SPOILER WARNING!

The following thoughts contain minor spoilers for Keep on the Shadowfell. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read it. And if you're in my gaming group then you definitely shouldn't be reading it.

You have been fairly warned.

(1) The production values of the module are disappointing. It has a cover price of $30 and Amazon had been advertising it as a  hardcover. It isn't. Two flimsy pamphlets and three poster maps are packaged in a lightweight cardboard folder. And when I say "flimsy pamphlet" I mean flimsy. The paper is of a lighter weight than that previously used in Dragon and Dungeon magazine and the "covers" of the pamphlets are of the exact same paper. I am extraordinarily gentle with my reading material, and after a single reading the ink is already being rubbed off the edge of one "cover". Frankly, I will be shocked if these last through a single session.

The poster maps are pretty nifty, although they follow the current WotC style of fetishizing light sources. Everything seems to glow: Walls, ceilings, furniture. These poster maps are lovingly rendered with computer graphics -- but they have no reality to them.

(2) The writing in the Quick Start Rules is abominably bad. For anyone who hasn't been played a roleplaying game before, the content here is completely inadequate for teaching them how to actually play the game. On the other hand, the writer has chosen to address the reader as if they had no idea what an RPG was. So the newbie isn't helped and the experienced player feels like they're being talked down to... who exactly is the target audience supposed to be for this pablum?

(3) The pregenerated characters, instead of being included on separate sheets (which the folder format would have allowed) are instead found at the back of the Quick Start Rules. This makes no sense.

(4) This may have been previously known, but it was the first time I realized that saving throws have a 55% chance of success instead of a 50% chance of success. (Instead of failing on 1-10 and succeeding on 11-20, they fail on 1-9 and succeed on 10-20.) I have no idea why they chose to do it that way.

(5) I am still annoyed that they undid 3rd Edition's fix to the critical hit mechanics.

(6) The streamlined actions (standard/move/minor/free) are nice to see, along with the accompanying simplification of the rules for charging and running. I think they were right to conclude that the complexity of full actions wasn't giving much in return. And I think replacing the concept of a 5-foot step with the idea of a "shift" (which doesn't provoke an AoO but does require a move action) also simplifies the flow of combat.

(7) It is completely impossible to play 4th Edition without miniatures. Unlike every previous version of the game (including 3rd Edition), the game literally does not function without a grid. I typically use miniatures, but this still annoys me.

(You will probably still hear people talk about how 4th Edition can be played without miniatures. But given the sheer number of abilities which are only useful because they allow for very precise movement on the combat grid, this is roughly akin to claiming that you can play Chess without a board. While it's true, it's only because you're explicitly imagining the board in your head. In 3rd Edition this wasn't the case: When I played without miniatures in 3rd Edition, I was imagining the game world and then using the mechanics -- which were all based on real-world measurements -- to adjudicate. The 3.5 revision weakened that connection somewhat by using squares as the default terminology, but the underlying mechanics of 3.0 were still essentially unchanged. 4th Edition embraces the grid completely and irrevocably.)

(8) The fact that you lose unspent action points when you take an extended rest reminds me of this blog post at Rampant Games. Its a mechanic that encourages players to push on without rest... unless, of course, they've expended all their accumulated action points. (However, I have been informed that you can only spend one action point per encounter. This rule doesn't appear in the Quick Start Rules, but if it's true then it obviates this advantage of the system entirely.)

(9) Contrary to the designers' claims, however, I doubt that the 15-minute adventuring day is going anywhere. This was inevitable, of course, because the 15-minute adventuring day had nothing to do with the system (except insofar as the system features daily-based spike powers) and everything to do with DMing style.

To be continued...

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(Maddow has written up her thoughts for a piece at Huffington Post.)

Maddow's concern boils down to this: If the nomination fight lasts until the convention in August, she doesn't believe that the Democratic nominee for president can beat John McCain in November. Despite this, Clinton wants to be President. Clinton obviously knows that if she concedes the nomination to Obama, she has no chance to become President. On the other hand, if she takes it to the convention she has a chance to become the nominee. And if she becomes the nominee she has a slim chance of beating McCain in November.

And "if what you really want is to be President of the United States -- a slim chance of becoming President (a fight at the convention) is better than no chance of becoming President (because you dropped out)."

I don't necessarily agree with Maddow's contention that a convention fight spells certain doom for the Democrats in November -- although the historical precedents of 1968, 1972, and 1980 hardly bode well. But it's certainly not an optimal situation. I've long felt that Hillary Clinton's vision of Democratic strategy has been profoundly wrong in comparison to Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy (it's one of the reasons I don't support her), and now she seems willing to risk immolating her entire party if the concession prize is a slim chance that she gets to be President.

Fortunately, Rachel Maddow also proposes a solution: 

To sum this up:

(1) Barack Obama has reached one finish line by winning a majority of the pledged delegates.

(2) But if Barack Obama is going to wrap up this nomination race cleanly, then he needs to get 90 of the remaining 210 undeclared superdelegates to declare for him by May 31st.

So what can you do to help?

Well, most of you reading this have already cast your vote in the primaries. You've exercised your most primal form of political power, and you've helped Barack Obama cross that first finish line. (And if your state hasn't held its primary, yet, you should make sure that you do vote. And get as many of your friends to vote as possible.)

And, of course, if you haven't already donated to Obama's campaign, then you should donate today. Money is another one of those primal forms of political power, and even the price of a cup of coffee can make a difference.

But, more immediately, it's time to help Obama cross that second finish line by exercising your most important right in a democracy: Speech.

You can find a list of currently undeclared superdelegates at Democratic Convention Watch. I urge you to take a look at that list. If there's a representative, senator, governor, or DNC party member on that list from your state, then you can make a difference by sending them a letter or writing an e-mail or making a phone call. Tell them that you support the winner of the primaries and the leader in pledged delegates, Barack Obama. Stress to them the importance of bringing an undisputed conclusion to this primary fight as soon as possible, so that the entire party can turn its focus to the general election in November. Ask them to publicly endorse.

To make it even easier, I've compiled contact information and organized it by state. (However, I probably won't be able to keep this list updated in a timely fashion, so remember to check the page at Democratic Convention Watch.)

UNDECLARED SUPERDELEGATES

DONATE TO BARACK OBAMA'S CAMPAIGN

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Go to Part 1

Continuing my thoughts from yesterday, this time with a...

SPOILER WARNING!

The following thoughts contain minor spoilers for Keep on the Shadowfell. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read it. And if you're in my gaming group then you definitely shouldn't be reading it.

You have been fairly warned.

(10) The editing is atrocious. I can only hope they do a better job with the actual core rulebooks. For example, I'm pretty sure that the Empire of Nerath and the Empire of Nareth are actually the same thing.

(11) Unfortunately, these types of gratuitous errors aren't limited to the fluff content. The rules are also riddled with errors. For example, the quick start rules define two types of cover: Normal Cover and Superior Cover. These are naturally referred to in various places throughout the adventure: A treeline or a boulder or a piece of furniture will either grant normal cover or it will grant superior cover.

Unfortunately, some obstacles will also grant "cover" -- which is neither "normal cover" nor "superior cover". I'm guessing that I'm supposed to interpret "cover" as being "normal cover", but when you take the trouble to define a precise technical term then you should make the effort to actually use the precise technical terms you've defined.

(12) Other rules aren't explained properly. For example, when describing the rules for handling a pit trap, the module states "if a bull rush forces a creature into the pit, it can immediately attempt a saving throw to avoid going over the edge". Fair enough. But I've been led to understand from other sources that this is true for any type of forced movement that would cause a character to suffer falling damage. Almost all of the pregen PCs, in fact, have forced movement abilities. Why didn't they include the complete rule?

(13) Another example: Upon first reading the Quick Start Rules, I was annoyed by the fact that a dying character was doomed to die unless someone helped them. According to the Quick Start Rules, a dying character must make a saving throw each round. If they succeed, their condition stays the same. If they fail three times, however, they die. Apparently, I thought, no one ever wakes up on their own after being knocked unconscious in 4th Edition Land.

I have since been led to understand that, in other preview material, the full rule has been revealed: If you roll a natural 20 on your saving throw, you wake up with one-quarter your hit points. Why on earth wasn't that sentence included?

(14) Several NPCs in the adventure use rules (like the recharge rules and aura rules) which are never explained. This, frankly, is completely inexcusable in an introductory product.

(15) Making the rules even more confusing is the fact that there are actually two sets of Quick Start Rules: One for the players and another for the DM. At first I thought this was a practical piece of utilitarian design: The DM can have a copy of the rules for easy reference and so can the players.

But then I discovered that they were actually two different sets of Quick Start Rules. And for reasons beyond my comprehension, the player's Quick Start Rules don't include a lot of the rules the players will need to play their characters. (For example, they don't even include all of the rules necessary to understand the abilities on the pregenerated character sheets.)

So, for me, the entire player's Quick Start Rules packet is useless: I'll be xeroxing the pregenerated characters out of it (so that they can actually be used) and I'll be xeroxing the DM's Quick Start Rules so that my players will actually have the rules they need to play the game.

(16) The first two encounters in the adventure use the exact same map and the exact same concept (kobolds ambush the party while they're traveling on the road). The sense of deja vu was palpable even as I was reading it. I can only imagine the experience at the game table will be moreso.

What makes this design even more ridiculous is that the second ambush on the road doesn't make sense. The first ambush happens while the PCs are on their way to the village of Winterhaven. The second is supposed to happen shortly after they leave it. But after leaving Winterhaven, the adventure assumes the PCs will go to one of two locations: Either a dragon burial site or the kobold lair.

Neither of these locations lie on the road. The most direct route from Winterhaven to either location is, in fact, directly through the wilderness. So why does the adventure assume you'll be able to (essentially) reuse the ambush-on-the-road scenario when the PCs won't be on a road?

(17) "The tall hobgoblin calls to the others in Common: 'Don't kill 'em. We can sell 'em to the Bloodreavers as slaves.'"

This is apparently a bit of foreshadowing for H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth. Pity they didn't include any rules for dealing nonlethal damage.

(18) The skill challenges in this adventure are particularly lackluster. In particular, they continue to demonstrate the same railroading qualities that the sample posted to WotC's website did. It's possible that this is merely because this is an introductory adventure, but it certainly didn't do much to convince me that the core rulebooks are going to resolve any of the problems I have with the mechanics WotC has shown us.

(19) Speaking of skill challenges, let's talk about Sir Keegan. Sir Keegan was the last commander of the keep before being driven mad by the emanations of the Shadowfell Rift. In his madness he killed his wife and his closest friends before the garrison of the keep turned on him, drove him into the dungeons beneath the keep, and sealed the entrance behind him. In the dungeons, Sir Keegan regained his sanity and, overcome with remorse, poisoned himself. He somehow ended up as a sentient undead skeleton (the details here are vague), and dedicated himself to making sure that the Shadowfell Rift was never open.

Now, bearing that story in mind, consider how the PCs will encounter Sir Keegan for the first time:

Wow. Dramatic.

But let's take a moment and analyze this: Who, exactly, built this crypt for him? Did he just decide to have one built for himself on the off-chance he might need it in the event that he would be driven insane, go on a murderous rampage, and then be trapped in the dungeons beneath the keep by his own men?

Well, perhaps Sir Keegan was a master stone-carver. And, after being trapped in the dungeons without any food, quickly chiseled out a crypt for himself before poisoning himself. And, naturally, after dedicating himself to making sure that the rift was never opened again he would just seal himself inside that crypt and never emerge... even while cultists set up shop next door and begin working to open the rift.

Makes perfect sense... right?

Okay, setting those problems aside, let's turn our attention to the meat of this encounter: The social skill challenge that Sir Keegan triggers. A social skill challenge that will result in brilliant conversational gems like this one:

... sound kinda cheesy? Well, perhaps you'll prefer this one:

Seriously. I'm not even kidding around. Keegan's first bit of dialogue in each example is lifted straight from the module, as is the suggested skill check. In order to succeed at this social skill challenge, the PCs have to make four successful skill checks before failing at four skill checks, with each skill check representing a Q&A exchange. (The PCs can also decide to go with straight up Diplomacy and/or Bluff checks if they prefer.)

(20) They finally fixed the encounter format they pioneered in the waning days of 3rd Edition. They're still using the useful and easy-to-access two-page spread for each encounter, but rather than splitting crucial information across two different locations (by having a keyed description in one place and the encounter information in another), they're using the encounter format for each keyed area.

I note, however, that the format requires every last square inch of a dungeon to be covered by an encounter. I suspect they consider this a feature: "After all," they'll say, "An empty room is a boring room."

But, of course, just because a room doesn't have a monster or a trap in it doesn't mean that it's empty or boring. More importantly, if the PCs know that there's going to be something exciting behind every single door that they kick in, it rather lessens the moment of anticipation. 

The other thing I'll note about the new format is that the designers made a big deal in their pre-release publicity about how 4th Edition would be featuring multi-room encounters. I guess this is sort of true, but the only thing that's really changed is that they're drawing their arbitrary "monsters won't go past this point" lines in slightly different ways. I doubt I'll be seeing any meaningful difference in play, since my 3rd Edition campaigns already feature multi-room running battles on a regular basis. This is another one of those areas where my experience seems to have been considerably at odds with the "common wisdom".

But we'll see what happens in actual gameplay. It would actually be pretty awesome if I was totally surprised.

To be continued...

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Go to Part 1

SPOILER WARNING!

The following thoughts contain minor spoilers for Keep on the Shadowfell. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read it. And if you're in my gaming group then you definitely shouldn't be reading it.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

My overall impression with the plot and structure of the adventure can be pretty much summed up with this: I kept flipping back to the credits page to convince myself that Mike Mearls and Bruce Cordell were actually responsible for this.

Bruce Cordell, for example, also wrote the inaugural module for 3rd Edition: The Sunless Citadel. The Sunless Citadel was a piece de resistance. I've played it once and ran it twice and I consider it one of the best D&D modules ever written.

Keep on the Shadowfell, on the other hand, seems rather lifeless and predictable. It's a paint-by-numbers D&D adventure. 

Generic Fantasy Village #1 (a.k.a. Winterhaven) is lifeless, filled with cardboard cut-outs who are scripted with quests as if they were stock pieces lifted from Ye Local CRPG.

The Generic Goblin Encounters are uninspiring: Ambush. Guards. Barracks. Boss. Repeat.

Fight zombies in underground crypt. Fight skeletons in graveyard.

Fight Evil Priest in Demon Fane.

And I know that these are all classic archetypes that get used all the time. Heck, I'm using some of them right now in my Ptolus campaign. But you can use classic archetypes and breathe fresh life into them and you can use classic archetypes and end up with bland cardboard.

My impression of Keep on the Shadowfell, having read through it, is one of bland cardboard.

But this puts me in something of an awkward position. I still want to use Keep on the Shadowfell as a test run for 4th Edition, but I've only got one of two options:

(1) Run the adventure as written, despite the fact that I think there are fundamental adventure design problems that largely have nothing to do with the 4th Edition ruleset.

(2) Try to redesign the adventure.

The problem with option one is that the design problems could end up poisoning the well. If the session flops, is that because 4th Edition is a flop? Or does it just mean that the adventure isn't any good?

The problem with option two is that I don't actually know 4th Edition. If I go in and start mucking around with the encounter designs, I could very easily end up unwittingly sabotaging things that make 4th Edition fun to play in ways that 3rd Edition isn't. In other words, I could end up inadvertently obviating the entire point of the exercise.

So I think what I'll probably end up doing is something like a remix of the module: Leave the encounter design alone, but go in and futz around with the fluff text. Give the adventure a stronger backbone and a richer mythology. Flesh out Winterhaven to give it some unique character and depth. Maybe add a few more encounters to make the threat posed by the Keep a little more real and pervasive.

We'll see how that goes. I'll post an update once I've actually run the playtest. (Which, unfortunately, may not be for a couple more weeks. We had originally scheduled it for May 24th. But then the release date was pushed back and I didn't actually get the module until May 22nd, so that was out of the question.)

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I thought I was done talking about Keep on the Shadowfell for a bit, but as I was prepping the adventure yesterday I had some interesting thoughts that I felt like sharing. These should give you some insight not only into how I go about prepping an adventure, but also how I analyze game design issues (both in the design of the system and in the design of the scenario).

DWARF FIGHTER

Let's start by looking at the pregenerated fighter character. As most of you probably already know, there are basically three different kinds of abilities in 4th Edition: At-will abilities (which can be used as often as you like); Encounter abilities (which require a short rest to recharge); and Daily abilities (which require an extended rest to recharge).

(Some at-will abilities will also recharge irregularly or in response to conditions on the battlefield.)

I've been kinda thinking of these different abilities like this: At-will abilities are the ones which define your character; encounter abilities are nifty; and daily abilities are awesome.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the at-will abilities that the pregenerated dwarf fighter has at 1st level: Cleave and reaping strike.

I'm very impressed by the ways in which the utility of these abilities interlock with each other.

First, there is the obvious situational advantage: Cleave is going to be preferable when you're standing in the middle of a minion mob; reaping strike is going to be useful when you're facing off against a single opponent.

But, there's also another trade-off point that happens because reaping strike is more useful than cleave when an opponent becomes sufficiently difficult to hit. Here's the math:

The average expected damage per round for cleave is:

(3.5 + 3.5 + 3 + 3 = 13) x probability to hit + (0 x probability to miss)

The average expected damage per round for reaping strike is:

(3.5 + 3.5 + 3 = 10) x probability to hit + (3 x probability to miss)

If the probability to hit is 50/50, for example, then you end up with cleave doing an average of (13 x 50%) 6.5 points of damage per round and reaping strike doing an average (10 * 50% + 3 * 50%) 6.5 points of damage per round.

So if my math here is correct, reaping strike is going to deal more damage to your opponents in any situation where you have to roll a natural 12 or higher to hit. (With a slight hiccup because minions aren't affected by missed attack damage like reaping strike.)

On the one hand, I'm impressed by how two distinctive fighting styles emerge quite naturally out of these probabilities. When you're using cleave you're swinging away like wild because your significantly superior to your opponents (you have a 50/50 or better shot of hitting them); in the other you're performing a variety of jabs and cutting blows against a more skilled opponent, trying to find the weakest spots in his defense.

On the other hand, I'm impressed because of the meaningful tactical choice that these interlocking utilities give you. Either utility, by itself, doesn't constitute a meaningful tactical choice: If one ability is merely better against multiple opponents and the other is better against solitary opponents, there's no meaningful choice to be made. If you're fighting multiple opponents you'd use cleave and if you're fighting a single opponent you'd use reaping strike.

Similarly, if one ability was merely better against difficult-to-hit opponents and the other was better against easy-to-hit opponents, there's no meaningful choice to be made. If you're fighting difficult-to-hit opponents you'll use reaping strike and if you're fighting easy-to-hit opponents you'd use cleave.

But once you combine the two, meaningful choices emerge. There will still be times when the decision basically boils down to running the math and figuring out what your best expected damage is, but in most situations involving multiple foes you'll actually be making a meaningful choice about what your immediate goal is and how you want to pursue it. (I also have a fair degree of confidence that, as tactical choices proliferate at higher levels, these choices will become increasingly non-trivial.)

Now, there is one caveat to this, which is that the minion rules pretty much muck it up.

For one example of this, let's look at reaping strike: Because minions never suffer damage from missed attacks, reaping strike is completely useless against minions. So if you're trying to hit a minion, there will never be any conceivable benefit to using reaping strike. The tactical choice has once again been rendered completely moot.

On other hand, if minions were damaged -- and, thus, killed -- by missed attacks, the tactical choice between cleave and reaping strike is meaningful: Do you use reaping strike for a guaranteed kill on one minion or do you use cleave for a chance to kill two minions? It becomes a trivial decision when you're only facing off against a single minion, of course (since cleave has no advantage over reaping strike) -- but that's true of any situation when you're facing off against a single opponent and minions are designed to come in large numbers.

(Of course, this change would make reaping strike more effective on average. And I hardly know enough about the complete panoply of 4th Edition abilities to know what other effects such a change might have.)

But, overall, these are well-designed abilities that give rise to a well-designed character. It'll be interesting to see what the other 1st level fighter abilities are and how they interact with cleave and reaping strike.

To be continued...

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Go to Part 1

SPOILER WARNING!

The following thoughts contain minor spoilers for Keep on the Shadowfell. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read it. And if you're in my gaming group then you definitely shouldn't be reading it.

TRAPS IN 4th EDITION

One of the features of 4th Edition that has been widely touted in WotC's promotional material have been the new trap design focusing on active traps. Basically, the argument is made that traditional traps either (a) suck up a lot of time because they encourage players to make constant Search checks; (b) are nothing more than random dice rolls that deal out arbitrary damage; and/or (c) focus the spotlight on the player of the rogue while everyone else sits around twiddling their thumbs. The new 4th Edition-style traps will allow everyone in the party to participate in overcoming the trap.

This seems like a laudable goal, but the actual examples we were given turned out to be fairly lackluster. They still required skill checks to detect them. They were slightly more interactive than a simple pit trap, but were pretty tame compared to some of the stuff we saw in the Book of Challenges (a 3rd Edition supplement that came out back in 2002), Traps & Treachery (a D20 supplement from Fantasy Flight Games that came out in 2001), or Grimtooth's Traps (an entire line of supplements that date back to 1981).

(Which ties into one of the reasons I've been perpetually turned off by the 4th Edition preview material. They seem to be constantly shouting about how they've reinvented the wheel. I like wheels as much as the next guy, but when somebody asks me to get excited about them I tend to get turned off by the fake enthusiasm.)

As for the effort to make traps into something that everybody can take part in, that seems to have boiled down to: The rogue makes a lot of skill checks and, if that doesn't work, then everybody else can beat the crap out of it.

For example, here's the countermeasures for the Whirling Blades trap (the first example of their "innovative" 4th Edition traps):

Color me unimpressed. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But when you claim that one of the fundamental gameplay elements of D&D for the past 30+ years have "rarely had a positive effect on the game", then the examples you give of "fixing" the "problem" probably shouldn't look exactly like the stuff we've been seeing in our D&D supplements for the past 30+ years.

THE CHAMBER OF STATUES

Keep on the Shadowfell has a couple of traps: There's a bog standard pit trap. There are some runes that cause characters to flee in panic. And then there's Area 16: The Chamber of Statues.

The Chamber of Statues is a two-part trap, but I'm only going to be talking about the first part. In this section there are three statues, starting with a large titan statue in the middle of the room which acts like a monster. On its initiative it uses its sweeping blow ability:

In other words, the titan statue picks a square in either its own space or immediately adjacent to its space. That square is the center of an 7-square by 7-square area. It then makes an attack against all non-Evil creatures within that area.

The titan statue is accompanied by two dragon statues, each of which use a force breath ability:

In other words, if you try to circle around the titan statue's reach the dragon statues will hit you with their force breath and push you back towards the titan statue. It's a simple dynamic, but it has a lot of potential to be fun in play. Unfortunately, there are several design problems here.

THE WALK AROUND: One of the ways you can work your way through the trap is to make an Athletics check to jump onto the statue. This allows you to avoid the titan statue's attacks. So you could potentially jump onto the statue, avoid its attacks, jump off the other side and head to safety on the other side of the room (without ever getting close enough to the dragon statues to get targeted by their force breath).

The problem is that there's absolutely no reason to do that: You can simply walk right past the entire trap. Why? The titan statue's sweeping blow isn't triggered as a reaction -- its an action taken on the titan statue's initiative. Nor does the titan statue have reach (which would allow it to take opportunity attacks). That means, once the titan statue makes its first attack, everyone is free to walk right past it.

LACK OF COOPERATION: As with the sample traps posted on WotC's website, this trap features the ability to either whack on it or disable it. This theoretically opens up a bit more interactivity than the website samples because, in this trap, there are multiple targets that aren't dependent on each other: The thief could be working on the titan statue while the other characters are whacking away on the dragon statues.

Only that isn't actually true, because there's no reason to go anywhere near the dragon statues (even if you don't simply walk right past the entire trap): If you stick to the west side of the titan statue you're completely out of their range.

LACK OF COOPERATION 2: This trap also introduces the ability for non-Thievery checks to disable traps: The dragon statues (but not the titan statue) can be disabled by either four successful Thievery checks or six successful Arcana checks.

Setting aside the fact that disabling the dragon statues is completely irrelevant, there's a deeper design problem here: The Thievery and Arcana checks can't be used in conjunction with each other. Either you disable the trap using Thievery checks or you disable the trap using Arcana checks -- you can't mix-and-match.

Based on other traps in the adventure, this seems to be a frequent (but not required) feature of magic-based traps. However, it always requires more Arcana checks than Thievery checks, which means that you'll always see the exact same dynamic in play with traps of this type: The guy with the Thievery skill will try to disable the trap. If he fails, the guy with the Arcana skill will try to disable the trap.

This doesn't actually make the trap any more interactive, nor does it actually get more players involved in the process. (At any given time, there's still just one guy making skill checks.) It just means that the entire thing takes more time and becomes a lot more monotonous.

WotC claims that one of the problems with traps in 3rd Edition was that the rogue made a Disable Device check while everyone else sat around and watched him. So explain to me how this is "fixed" by giving us a trap in which the rogue makes 6+ skill checks in order to disable the trap while everybody else stands around watching them work?

(Why 6+ checks? An Athletics check to jump up on the statue. A Perception check (DC 25) to find the access panel. And then at least four Thievery checks to disable the statue. So it will take a minimum of 6 checks, but given the probable skill modifiers of the pregenerated rogue PC they'll probably be making 9 or 10 checks in total.)

JUST BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF IT: But none of what I've described actually matters because none of these statues can move and none of them have relevant ranged attacks. This means that the PCs will stay in the safe area by the northern door and use their ranged attacks to whittle away at the titan statue's hit points.

THE BOTTOM LINE

So this entire elaborate trap which, at first glance, appears to be filled with interesting possibilities, will, in fact, be resolved in one of three exceptionally boring ways:

(1) One of the PCs will suffer 1 or 2 attacks from the statue and then they'll all walk out of the room.

(2) The rogue will make a half dozen or more skill checks and then they'll all walk through the room.

(3) The PCs will engage in the most boring combat imaginable: Standing where the opponent can't possibly hurt them, the players will repetitively roll dice until they finally manage to rack up the magic number and can walk through the room unimpeded.

I honestly don't understand how such a lackluster encounter got designed. I also don't see how it could have possibly been playtested without such fundamental design errors being exploited by the playtesters. (And if it was playtested and the playtesters exposed its flaws, why weren't they fixed?)

Tomorrow I fix it.

To be continued...

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Go to Part 1

Yesterday I analyzed the shortcomings in the Chamber of Statues encounter from Keep on the Shadowfell. Today I'm going to look at how we can fix this.

SPOILER WARNING!

The following thoughts contain minor spoilers for Keep on the Shadowfell. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read it. And if you're in my gaming group then you definitely shouldn't be reading it.

THE LAYOUT

We'll start by shifting the layout. I think there are two directions we can go with this.

CENTERPIECE: First, we can make the room larger, put the titan statue in the center of the room, and add some additional dragon statues.

With this layout, whenever the PCs try to circle around the dangerous sweeping blow of the titan statue, the dragon statues will push them back towards the center of the room.

ILLUSION OF SAFETY: This layout has a greater similarity to the original layout and doesn't increase the number of dragon statues.

With this layout, clever PCs will notice the limited range of the titan statue's attack and conclude that they can safely circle around it to the east. But if the try that, the dragon statues will use their force breath ability to push them back towards the titan statue.

NO CHEAP SHOTS

The dragon statues in the original encounter already have a force shot ability that interacts with the second part of this trap (which I'm not dealing with here):

We're going to make an adjustment to this ability in order to stop the PCs from getting to a safe distance and then taking pot-shots at the titan statue.

PROXIMITY SAFETY

We'll use the original mechanics from the encounter to allow a character to make an Athletics check to jump onto the titan statue or the dragon statue. But we'll add the following detail: The dragon statues won't use their defensive force shot against any creature in the same space as another statue (the designer of the trap didn't want to risk having the dragon statues damage the other statues).

So getting onto a statue makes a character effectively immune against the titan statue's sweeping blow and the force abilities of the dragon statues. However, there's a limited number of such safe zones in the encounter (particularly if you use the Illusion of Safety layout).

COOPERATION

By making the dragon statues an active part of the encounter that can't simply be ignored, we've already encouraged a higher level of cooperation: The rogue can only be dealing with one statue at a time, making it necessary for the other characters to deal with the other statues (or at least take actions to avoid them until the rogue can deal with them).

However, we'll go one step further and make it possible for more than one character specialty to work on a single statue at the same time. For the titan statue:

For the dragon statues:

Now the rogue and the wizard can work together to rapidly disable the magical statues through the combined use of their skills.

If you really wanted spice things up, you could even make it possible for the statues to be bloodied and then add the following:

Now everybody in the party can work to disable a statue together. Instead of having the characters race against each other (will the statue run of hit points, Thievery checks, or Arcana checks first?), all of the characters can work together towards a common goal.

This also creates a meaningful strategic choice for the group to make as they try to deal with this encounter: Do we split up and try to deal with the dragon statues separately to clear a path to the exit? Or do we all focus our efforts on disabling the tougher titan statue and reach the exit that way?

In this last section, it should be noted, I'm not just talking about adjustments to this particular trap -- I'm talking about house rules which, based on what I've seen of 4th Edition to date, would appear to fundamentally change some of the basic ways in which the game works. But the reward appears to be gameplay which is both more interactive and offers richer strategic and tactical choices.

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This is closing weekend for Agatha Christie's The Hollow (in which I star as Inspector Colquhoun)! The show is a certified hit, playing to sold out crowds last weekend. So if you're planning to come -- and you should plan to come! -- you should make a point of making reservations.

Fridays - Saturdays at 7:30pm
Sunday Matinees at 2:00pm

Buy Tickets

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Earlier this month, I included some analysis of skill challenges in my essay on the dissociated mechanics of 4th Edition. Because the core rulebooks had not yet been released, I included a disclaimer in that essay saying, basically: "Hey, I might be wrong about this. There might be more details in the core rulebooks that will clear some of this stuff up."

Well, I've now had a chance to glance through the core rulebooks. I haven't even come close to reading through (let alone thinking about or analyzing) the 4th Edition ruleset, but one of things I did make a point of looking at were the skill challenge mechanics.

And having done so, I can now safely say this: I was wrong. The skill challenge mechanics are not as bad I said they were.

They are much, much worse.

SERIOUSLY, WTF?

So, here's a quote from the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide:

That's just one paragraph out of the 8 pages in the DMG dealing with skill challenges, but it boggles the mind to consider how many things are wrong with it.

ROLL FOR INITIATIVE: It's not just the rolling for initiative that's problematical, it's the fact that the characters "must make a check on their turn". In other words, if you're engaged in tense negotiations with the Duke the barbarian can't simply decide to stand back and let the diplomat work -- the rules mandate that they get involved. If the rogue is working to defuse a bomb, Joe the Bumbler can't just wait in the next room -- the rules mandate that Joe has to start yanking on the wires.

WotC claimed that they wanted to design a set of rules that made it possible for everyone to stay involved with the game during every single encounter. Apparently, however, the only way they could think of for doing that was to mandate that everyone stay involved... whether they want to or not.

BE CREATIVE... AND PAY THE PRICE: If a player comes up with a unique, clever, or unanticipated way of dealing with the skill challenge, make sure to hit them with a hard DC to encourage them to stop being unique and clever.

A little later, in a section entitled "Reward Clever Ideas", the DMG actually says this: "In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn't expect to play a role. Try not to say no. Instead, let them make a roll using the skill but at a hard DC... This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth..."

Of course, it does no such thing. If the only "reward" for "thinking about the challenge in more depth" is that the challenge will be harder, why would you ever think about the challenge in more depth?

BE CREATIVE... BUT NOT TOO CREATIVE: And just in case we haven't already dissuaded you from trying to think creatively, let's hammer that final nail into the coffin by making sure that you can only use a secondary skill (i.e., a skill not defined in the skill challenge) once in any given skill challenge.

And it's worse than that:

"Be creative", they say. But you'll be punished for it with a harder skill check. And you can only be creative once per encounter. We don't want all that creativity to go to your head. After all, the DM has a script for you to follow and he's going to tell you what it is.

In virtually every roleplaying game I've ever played, the default style of play was for the player to tell the GM what they wanted to do and for the GM to figure out how to adjudicate that with the rules.

But the new DMG is telling us that, in 4th Edition, the DM is supposed to tell the players what they're going to do and then, if the players want to deviate from that narrow CRPG-style script, they're going to suffer the consequences and the DM will only let them get away with it so many times.

It's certainly true that, in other games, you could get a bad DM who would railroad the players and force them to do what he wanted them to do by making everything else difficult or impossible. The difference is that, in 4th Edition, making everything else difficult or impossible is what you're supposed to do. Those are the rules of the game.

In terms of the rules it's hocking, the philosophy it's espousing, the advice it's giving, and the style of gaming it encourages, this is some of the worst material I have ever seen in a roleplaying manual. It's literally right up there with World of Synnibar, which prohibited the GM from making house rules and informed the players that, if they caught the GM deviating from the official rulebook, they should chastise the GM and reward themselves double XP for that session.

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