My work on converting the archives of the Alexandrian over the past few days have been something of a trip down memory lane as I go digging through material I wrote up to half a decade ago. And occasionally stumbling across comments that I don’t think I ever saw because of the broken and disjointed commenting system on the old site.

One discovery that particularly caught my eye came in response  to the Keep on the Shadowfell: Analyzing the Design series I wrote as a precursor to my remix of the module in 2008. A couple people mentioned that the specific traps I had been talking about in 2008 had been “fixed to a large extent” when WotC revised the module for its release as a freebie PDF.

I was curious enough to check it out.

And discovered that they’d fixed almost nothing. The only two improvements I can identify are:

1. They allowed Arcana and Thievery checks to stack for the purposes of disabling the dragon statues. (A suggestion I’d made in my original remix notes.)

2. They made it clear when the arcane walls of the Whirlpool Trap would activate (“when a creature moves into the 4-square-by-4-square area between the statues”) and the location of the walls once they appear:

But there are two problems with this “solution”:

First, as I discussed in my original essay on the matter, you’ve designed the trap so that it can’t be affected by anyone outside of the trap. (In order to disable the trap, you have to destroy the cherubs. And you can’t attack the cherubs if they’re on the other side of the wall.) They’ve removed the explicit references in the module itself to characters doing the impossible, but that doesn’t remove the larger design concerns:

(a) It’s not fun. In general, this means you will have one character inside the trap who needs to make several attacks against the cherub vases while everyone else sits around and watches.

(b) What happens if the character trapped inside the whirlpool is killed? As far as I can tell, the arcane walls just remain in place for the rest of eternity. (They can’t come down until the cherubs are destroyed; and the cherubs can’t be destroyed by anyone who isn’t caught in the trap.) Not only does this mean there’s no way to retrieve your fallen comrade’s battered body, it also means that the only path for reaching the Big Bad Boss of Keep on the Shadowfell is now blocked by two permanent walls of arcane energy.

Second, the trap breaks the rules. The Quick-Start Rules included in the original Keep on the Shadowfell included “Barriers” as one of the types of Area of Effect:

Barrier: A barrier runs along the edge of a specified number of squares. A barrier must cross at least one edge of the origin square.

This was problematic because the core rulebooks didn’t include “Barriers” and instead included rules for “Walls”:

Wall: A wall fills a specified number of contiguous squares within range, starting from an origin square. Each square of the wall must share a side — not just a corner — with at least one other square of the wall, but a square can share no more than two sides with other squares in the wall (this limitation does apply when stacking squares on top of each other). You can shape the wall however you like within those limitations. A solid wall, such as a wall of ice, cannot be created in occupied squares.

The original version of the trap was problematic in any case because it used the keyword “wall” to describe the arcane cage, and one just had to kind of assume that it meant “barrier” if you were using the Quick-Start Rules. You’ll note, however, that the revised version of the module is clearly using the rules for a “barrier” in its diagram.

So… no problem, right? The Quick-Start rules describe “barriers” and this trap, designed to be used with the Quick-Start Rules, now clearly follows those rules.

Except (and this is my favorite bit) somebody noticed that the rules for “barriers” were outdated and should never have been published in the first place, and so the revised Quick-Start Rules designed to be used with the revised version of Keep on the Shadowfell… don’t include the rules for barriers. The entire section was cut.

(Did they bother to replace these rules with the rules for walls which were supposed to be there in the first place? Don’t be silly. Of course they didn’t.)

So you have a trap which explicitly creates walls, but they don’t follow the rules for walls… and it doesn’t really matter anyway, because the Quick-Start Rules didn’t bother including rules for walls.

As I mentioned a couple days ago, the fun I’ve been having with the Castle Ravenloft board game has recently inspired me to read (or re-read) I6 Ravenloft and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. This has put me in the rather interesting position of comparing all three. And this has, in turn, forced me to ask a simple question:

Are we really this stupid?

Let me expand on that a little bit.

The Castle Ravenloft boardgame is a dungeon-crawler without a Dungeon Master. Out of necessity, therefore, it is forced to provide a “program” for each monster in the game. When the monster is activated, it simply follows the program and takes the actions described. It’s a relatively simple mechanic which provides some interesting strategic wrinkles. (Since you know what the monster will do when presented with a given set of stimuli, you can exert some degree of “control” over them in a semi-prescient fashion.)

That’s all fine. But let me give you a sampling of the text from the boardgame:

Place the Start tile on the table. Place each Hero on a square adjacent to the stairway on the Start Tile. When a Hero reveals the Laboratory […] place Klak on the bone pile.

(…)

If the Skeleton is adjacent to a Hero, it attacks that Hero with a scimitar. If the Skeleton is within 1 tile of a Hero, it moves adjacent to the closest Hero and attacks that Hero with a charging slice. Otherwise, the Skeleton moves 1 tile toward the closest hero.

And here’s some text from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (pg. 32):

Have the players place their figures at the end of the tile, with the single circle closest to them and the other two farther away. Place a figure for Balam in the close circle.

(…)

On its turn, each zombie moves from its starting position toward the closest enemy it can attack. A zombie behind a door opens it as part of its first move action.

Both carcass eaters attack the closest PCs. If an adjacent character drops to -1 hit points or fewer for any reason, a carcass eater uses its rend fallen ability.

Is there a reason why we’re treating modern Dungeon Masters as if they were only barely more competent than an inanimate piece of cardboard?

Are we really this stupid?

ISOLATED ENCOUNTERS

Expedition to Castle Ravenloft was one of the earliest adventures to use the “delve format”. But this isn’t just a matter of growing pains: This kind of “so prepackaged you can just turn off your brain” method of designing encounters has remained a staple of WotC’s adventure design right up through today.

Conceptually, there’s one thing I really love about the delve format: Putting everything you need to run an encounter area in the description of the encounter area. That just makes good sense. But in practice, the delve format suffers from two problems:

First, it artificially isolates the “encounter”. This tends to fatally sabotage the entire point of the delve format to begin with.

For example, take encounter E6 in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft:

This encounter takes place the first time the PCs enter this crossroads from any direction.

Tactical Encounter: E6: Ghoul Foray on page 38.

Development: These ghouls are not part of the necromantic infection, but an independent pack of undead taking advantage of the chaos. After venturing out of the cemetery (area E8), the ghouls are moving from house to house in search of valuables and still-living creatures. They are upset by the quick conversion of zombie victims to yet more zombies, but they are so hungry that they consume even the rotting undead. They lust for fresh corpses.

That information is, in my opinion, rather crucial for running the encounter. Attempting to isolate a tactical encounter from the context in which that tactical encounter occurs, in my opinion, results in a very choppy, ineffective style of play.

But even if you moved that information into the tactical encounter itself, the problem still wouldn’t be solved because encounters shouldn’t be taking place in a physical vacuum. For example, encounter E6 here takes place just one block away from Barovia’s church, which is encounter E7. What happens if the battle with the ghouls goes poorly and the PCs decide to retreat towards the church? Now I’m forced to go back to the adventure key, reorient the encounter within the context of the other geographical features around it, and then flip to the delve format presentation of E7 in yet another section of the book.

Rather than making it easier for me to find all the information I need, you’ve got me flipping back and forth through the module just trying to orient myself.

(Most of these problems were solved by Keep on the Shadowfell, which simply keyed the adventure to the tactical encounters. But after Keep on the Shadowfell, Wizards went right back to doing it the broken way they’d been doing it before.)

THE PERFECT ENCOUNTER

The other problem with the delve format, in my opinion, is that it tends to encourage the unproductive false idol of the “perfect encounter”. (Partly because it isolates the encounter and partly because the format inherently forces all encounters to be designed to the same specs.) Each of these encounters is designed to be “perfectly balanced” with monsters who have been pre-selected, pre-positioned, and pre-programmed.

This tends to limit flexibility. You’ve invested a lot of preparation into carefully arranging the “perfect encounter” involving goblin bombadiers and guard drakes scurrying about a half-excavated room:

But if you have those goblin bombadiers respond to a cry for reinforcements from the goblins just down the hall, you’re throwing all of that preparation away.

Plus, when you’ve put this much effort into prepping an encounter, you can’t just let the PCs avoid it.

And, to make a long story short, that’s how you end up with adventure modules which are just long, linear strings of isolated, prepackaged encounters.

ENCOUNTERS ON THE FLY

The counter-argument, of course, is that encounters shouldn’t be boring.

I couldn’t agree more.

But I don’t think we need to try so hard. I think when the original Ravenloft module reads:

The maid, Helga, is a vampire who will attack the PCs only when an opportunity to do so without having to fight the entire party presents itself. She also attacks if commanded to do so by Strahd. Helga will join the party, if asked to. She claims to be the daughter of a villager, cruelly forced into service of the Strahd.

We don’t need a pregenerated tactical map showing where Helga is standing in room K32 with accompanying text telling the DM to have the players position their miniatures within 10 feet of the door when it opens in order to have an interesting encounter.

I think publishers can put a little more trust in DMs (and, as DMs, we can put a little more trust in ourselves). So that when we ask the question–

Are we really this stupid?

–the answer can be, “No. We’re not.”

And maybe that means the goblin bombadiers don’t lay an ambush in their excavated chamber. Maybe it means that the PCs end up barricading themselves in that chamber. Or the goblins all retreat into that chamber. Or the PCs return to find animated goblin zombies have been stationed in that chamber as guards.

Once you remove the shackles of believing that the “perfect encounter” can be predesigned, you’ll be tapping into the strength of the RPG medium in creating encounters which are perfect for your gaming group because they were created by your gaming group.

I don’t have much interest in 4th Edition (see D&D is Dead, Long Live 4th Edition), but when I heard about the new D&D Starter Set I was hopeful that WotC was finally doing something that’s about 20 years overdue.

I’ve talked here before about the lack of a Gateway Product for D&D (and, by extension, the lack of a gateway product for the entire roleplaying industry). To sum up: From 1974 to 1991, D&D was available in a single boxed set (just like other games) with a relatively inexpensive price point. In 1991, however, the Basic Set became a pay-to-preview product. (The distinction being that pre-1991 you might buy the Expert Set, but you would continue playing with your Basic Set. After 1991, when you bought the Rules Cyclopedia or the AD&D core rulebooks you took your Basic Set, stuck it in the closet, and never looked at it again: You were paying for an ephemeral piece of advertising that was designed to sell you the “real game”.)

Thus, starting in 1991, the real entry point for the game became a hardcover book. And when the Rules Cyclopedia went out of print, the cost of buying the game skyrocketed to $100+. D&D was now a game that (a) didn’t look like other games, (b) was extraordinarily expensive compared to other games, and (c) also required an immense investment in terms of time before you could even start playing (going from less than 100 pages including a solo adventure to 800+ pages spread across three hardbacks).

Basic Sets and Basic Games continued to be produced, but all of them were pay-to-preview products: Instead of descending from the tradition of Gygax/Arneson, Holmes, Moldvay, and Mentzer, these were created in the same fashion as the AD&D First Quest boxed set: In other words, these are products which tanked when they were first created and have continued to tank for two decades.

STARTER SET SALVATION

So when I heard they were releasing a new red box Starter Set and specifically evoking the 1983 Mentzer set as part of a product line that was specifically designed to provide a stable set of introductory products and a clear pathway for new players into the game I thought, “Hey, maybe they’ve finally figured it out.”

Did they?

Nope. The Starter Set is still a pay-to-preview product. You can’t even get to page 3 of the Dungeon Master’s Book before the game is trying to sell you the full version of the game you apparently should have been buying in the first place. And once you buy those additional books, the Starter Set is specifically designed to be stuck in the closet and never looked at again. Suckers.

This is a product which new players joining experienced groups will be told to skip; which smart consumers will identify as as a pay-to-preview false start; and which less aware consumers will buy, discover is an incomplete pay-to-preview version of the game, and either (a) stop buying D&D products or (b) feel vaguely ripped off when they go to buy the book they should have bought in the first place.

WHAT DO I BUY TO PLAY D&D?

The other stated goal of the D&D Essentials line is to eliminate the market confusion surrounding D&D. Imagine that you heard about a game called “Dungeons & Dragons” and you walked into a store tomorrow looking to buy a copy. In this scenario, there are arguably two problems with the PHB/DMG/MM triumvirate:

(1) They’re too expensive. $105 is an insanely high cost of entry.

(2) It’s entirely unclear that those are the three books, out of the vast number of D&D books available, that you’re supposed to buy.

So does Essentials solve these problems?

Of course not.

COST: Because the Starter Set is a pay-to-preview product, it’s a fake entry point to the game (suffering the exact same problem that the multiple versions of the 3rd Edition Basic Game did). If you’re entering the game through the Essentials line, the products you’re looking for are D&D Rules Compendium, at least one of the Heroes books, the Dungeon Master’s Kit, and the Monster Vault. Total cost of entry? $110. ($130 if you count both Heroes books. $150 if you bought the Starter Set.)

CONFUSION: The supposed ideal was that when someone asked, “What do I buy to play D&D?” The answer could be, “The Essentials.” But that doesn’t actually pan out because there are 9 different Essentials products (not including the dice set). You’re still facing a wall of confusing product and trying to figure out which three esoterically named products you’re supposed to be looking for (and that’s before we add in the extra confusion caused by the Starter Set fake-out).

Or maybe you’re supposed to buy all of them? At a whopping $210? That’s way too expensive, no thanks.

And this, of course, assumes that the consumer has gotten your note about the Essentials being the products they should be looking at. If they haven’t, they’re now faced with all of the Essentials products plus all of the non-Essentials products while trying to (a) realize that there are three different entry points into the exact same game and (b) which products, exactly, belong to which entry point.

COMPATIBILITY: But is D&D Essentials really the “exact same game”? It’s a debateable point. One can certainly say that D&D Essentials is just including (a) the errata and (b) alternate-but-completely compatible class builds.

But if I’m playing a fighter from Heroes of the Fallen Lands and my DM is using the Player’s Handbook, then we have two different versions of the fighter. That’s every bit as confusing as a player using a 3.5 ranger while the DM is using the 3.0 Player’s Handbook. Plus, the 4th Edition errata goes deep. This is a game which completely revised one of its core mechanics within mere weeks of being released, and more recently changed the basic foundation on which monsters are built. And the important point here is that not everyone uses the errata. Someone using a 4th Edition PHB without errata and someone using the new Rules Compendium are playing two versions of the game every bit as different as 3.0 and 3.5.

Now, I’m generally of the school of thought that 3.0 and 3.5 were more inter-compatible than most people gave them credit for. But I’ve certainly seen plenty of hiccups at tables where 3.0 and 3.5 PHBs were being used interchangeably. These sorts of problems will also crop up at tables attempting to use “vanilla 4th” and “Essentials 4th” at the same time.

MY POINT

I’ve talked before about WotC’s habit of saying, “Our goal is to do X. And in order to do X, we’re going to do not-X.”

So when Bill Slavicsek says, “[Essentials] forms the foundation of the the game moving forward and are designed to be the perfect way for new people to get into the game — thanks to the format, the price, and the approach to class builds.” Perhaps I should be unsurprised when we end up with is a format which is confusing to new players at a price point more expensive than any previous entry point for the game.

The Essentials line may or may not be a success for WotC. It certainly seems to be successful in getting some people (including myself) to take a second look at 4th Edition. (Unfortunately, the game I find waiting for me has the same basic problem that it’s still 4th Edition. And 4th Edition is still a game fundamentally designed to take most of the things I enjoy about roleplaying games out of D&D.)

But what I can guarantee you is that it will fail in its wider goal of reaching out to new customers in a new way. The Starter Set remains the same pay-to-preview product that has failed over and over and over again for the past 20 years. And the rest of the Essentials line is more expensive and more confusing to new customers than the existing options.

It’s a triple package of fail.

Which is not, of course, to say that no new players will enter the hobby through the Essentials products. First Quest may have been a failed product compared to OD&D or the ’77 thru ’91 Basic Sets, but people still bought it. And plenty of people have entered D&D through the PHB/DMG/MM triumvirate even if they are expensive and confusing for new players.

But we’re still waiting for WotC to offer a true gateway product for the RPG industry. And I anticipate that both D&D and the RPG industry as a whole will continue to suffer for it.

Keep on the Shadowfell was the inaugural introductory product for 4th Edition. When it was released, I shared my initial impressions and eventually ended up writing a lengthy series of essays in which I remixed the entire adventure.

One of the major problems I had at the time was the sheer sloppiness of the module: There were continuity errors in the adventure scenario and numerous self-contradictions in the rules. Ignoring some of the larger creative and structural issues with the adventure, on a very basic level the product was a mess.

In April 2009, Wizards of the Coast released a revised version of the module as a free PDF on their website. I didn’t pay much attention to it because I had already sampled 4th Edition, found it lacking in everything I value in an RPG, and moved on. But I did think it was a rather nice gesture on WotC’s part to make a corrected version of the product available.

Recently, however, I decided to re-visit this material with an eye towards using my remixed version of the module as the basis for an OD&D one-shot. Remembering that the module had been revised, I tracked down the PDF. My plan was to re-read the revised version of the module, see what had been improved, and then adapt my remix notes as necessary if I thought incorporating the changes would be worthwhile.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t even get past the first paragraph of the first encounter before discovering that WotC’s revision was just as sloppy as the original product.

The original module describes the encounter like this (pg. 16): “The player characters are on the King’s Road traveling toward Winterhaven east to west (or right to left on the map).” They are then ambushed by kobolds, as shown on this map:

The obvious problem, as I detailed in my original remix essay, is that the indicated kobolds are all standing in plain sight for characters traveling east to west along the road.

WotC’s keen-eyed revisers noticed the same thing, but they didn’t want to redo the cartography. So they opted to simply change the direction that the PCs are traveling (pg. 6): “The player characters are on the King’s Road traveling toward Winterhaven, west to east (or left to right on the map).”

Problem solved!

… except that’s completely impossible.

Because two pages earlier in the module we can see this map of the local area:

And, as you can clearly see, Winterhaven is at the western end of the King’s Road. You cannot travel west-to-east anywhere on the King’s Road and end up at Winterhaven.

Mistakes, of course, get made. (For example, both the original and revised versions of the module refer multiple times to the Burial Site being southwest of town. You’ll note that it isn’t.) But what you have here is an acknowledgment that there is a problem that needs to be fixed; a decision being made (either deliberately or ignorantly) to not fix the root of the problem; and ending up with a half-assed effort that just creates an entirely different problem.

And it doesn’t even fix the original problem, because there are still kobolds standing in plain sight.

This is symptomatic of WotC’s general culture of not-fixing (or even anti-fixing).

I was flipping through a friend’s copy of Dungeon Delve and took the opportunity to read through the introduction by Bill Slavicsek, the Director of R&D at WotC. He starts by describing the successful Dungeon Delves that WotC has run at various conventions over the past decade:

But from the opening of the show on Thursday, we knew we had found the crux of a winning formula. (…) The fans ate it up. We had enormous lines at the Delve that entire weekend. They lined up to get into the available party slots. They lined up to witness the action and see whether Monte Cook or Bruce Cordell or Ed Stark (or whoever else was part of the team at that time) could kill more characters as more and more of the Delve was revealed. They lined up to see the next dungeon details and character names get posted to the bulletin board. How far had they gotten? What had they killed? Who didn’t make it out of the last fight?

They had a winning format: A megadungeon serving as the shared campaign setting for a huge pool of players. They basically took core Old School play and condensed it down to a format that could be played rapid-fire over the couse of a convention weekend.

Nifty stuff.

With this book, the Dungeon Delve concept finally takes center stage as a core D&D product. It was a long time coming, but we needed that time to test concepts, try out new formats, and eventually get to the point where this product was not only viable, but in many ways necessary to the evolution of the D&D game.

This makes perfect sense. If you’re in the business of selling RPGs and you’ve got something that’s a proven success with RPG players, you should try to figure out how to bottle that success and sell it to the masses.

For the purpose of this product, a Dungeon Delve is a compact series of encounters appropriate for a specific level of play. This book contains 30 Dungeon Delves, one for each level of play. Each Delve features three encounters, forming a mini-adventure of sorts.

Wait… what?

So you had a format: Megadungeon. High mortality rate attracting lots of attention. Boatloads of players/characters sharing a single setting to create a sense of competition, rivalry, and shared accomplishment.

And your method of bringing this format to “center stage as a core D&D product” is to give us mini-dungeons featuring three encounters incapable of serving as a shared campaign setting in a system explicitly designed for low mortality rates?

WTF?

(And is it even possible for them to devalue the term “core” any more? Describing their splat books as “core” was bad enough, but now they’re actually claiming that their adventure modules are “core” products? Exactly what do you produce that isn’t a “core” product, WotC?)

Let me be clear here: There’s nothing wrong with either style of adventure. I think there’s room in any good campaign for both megadungeons and mini-adventures. I contributed mini-adventures to Atlas Games’ En Route II. My Mini-Adventure 1: Complex of Zombies is pretty much in the same ballpark. I haven’t actually taken a close look at the actual adventures in Dungeon Delve, but conceptually it’s an interesting and potentially useful product.

But what baffles me is a company saying, “Our goal is to do X. And in order to do X, we’re going to do not-X.”

I mean, there are many parts of the design of 4th Edition which followed that pattern: The designers say that they want to do X and then they release mechanics which either don’t do X or do the exact opposite of X.

I had simply assumed that was incompetence. But maybe that’s just the way that Slavicsek and his design team think. (Which would also explain why we got not-D&D when they tried to design D&D.)