This will start off with a bit of a quick review of the advantage/disadvantage system, so feel free to skip down a bit if you’re already thoroughly familiar with that.

In 5th Edition, various circumstances and abilities grant either advantage or disadvantage to a character attempting an action: If you have advantage, you roll 2d20 and keep the higher result. If you have disadvantage, you roll 2d20 and keep the lower result. If you have both advantage and disadvantage, they cancel out (and you just roll 1d20). And they do not stack (so no matter how many things are giving you advantage, for example, you still only roll 2d20 and keep the highest, not 3d20 or 5d20 or 10d20), which also means that even one factor granting advantage will cancel out any amount of disadvantage (and vice versa).

There are several benefits of the advantage/disadvantage system compared to giving circumstantial modifiers to the die rolls:

• The modifiers you’re rolling against are not in constant flux, reducing the amount of in-game calculation required.
• It is viscerally pleasing and immediately rewarding to roll 2d20 and take the higher/lower result. It’s fun to do and you can literally see how your advantage benefited you or your disadvantage cost you by looking at the result on your gained/discarded die.
• It helps maintain the “bounded accuracy” of the system; advantage helps you, but you can still only get die results of 1 to 20.
• “Advantage” and “disadvantage” are incredibly useful terms of art, which designers, scenario writers, and DMs can quickly and efficiently use for any number of purposes. For DMs, in particular, they provide a very simple way to make a fast ruling.

The reasons for not allowing advantage or disadvantage to stack are:

• To maintain the simplicity of that fast, efficient DM’s ruling. Once you’ve determined that something in the situation grants advantage, for example, you don’t have to keep thinking about all the other things that might grant advantage: You have advantage. Move forward. Roll the dice.
• You don’t need complicated stacking rules, nor do you need to allow abilities to stack in potentially absurd ways. This removes one vector by which an RPG system filled with myriad options can suddenly break from the unexpected combination of those options.
• There are some mathematical effects of allowing advantage to stack multiple d20’s into a single roll, the most notable of which, in my opinion, is that your percentage chance of scoring a critical hit radically expands. (This last point is debatable, however, as many would argue that this is perfectly reasonable if you’re enjoying a massively advantageous situation. It also only applies to actually stacking additional dice, but not to the scenario in which you stack all advantage and all disadvantage and then compare the totals to see whether advantage, disadvantage, or neither applies.)

This system has one additional advantage (pun intended) that I want to call specific attention to: The simple, clear-cut mechanical concept of “advantage” also encourages players to engage creatively with the game world in order to create fictional positioning that grants them advantage.

Another example of this that I’ve seen in actual play is Numenera‘s concept of an “asset” — on any given task, PCs can have up to two assets, each of which shifts the difficulty of the task by one step. The first asset “slot,” so to speak, is often occupied by having the right tool for the job. The second asset slot is usually dependent on having some sort of advantageous situation in the game world, and this naturally results in players seeking to create those in-world circumstances that will give them an asset on a task.

In both cases, the clear-cut term of art coupled to the specific fictional situation in the game world reinforces the fiction-mechanics cycle. The mechanic thus, almost paradoxically, encourages players to engage in the game in non-mechanical ways: It’s not enough to just “play your character sheet” by saying “I hit the orc with my +6 attack bonus,” because the mechanics are no longer confined to the bonuses on your character sheet.

Arguably, of course, you can get the same benefit from any system that allows GMs to assign situational bonuses and penalties. But in actual practice, the clear-cut mechanical concept with a term of art attached to it provides a common framework. People just talk about and think about “advantage” and “assets” in ways that they don’t talk about and think about a miscellanea of +1, +2, or +5 bonuses.

THE PROBLEM

Speaking of actual practice, however, this final — and arguably most important — aspect of advantage tends to frequently disappear at the table.

The problem, ironically, is the very versatility of the system. Because advantage is such an easy mechanical hook to use, the designers of the game have used it to model all sorts of things. It’s hard-coded into everything from class abilities to spells to magic items. For example:

Dwarven Resilience. You have advantage on saving throws against poison, and you have resistance against poison damage (explained in Chapter 9).

Or:

Beacon of Hope. This spell bestows hope and vitality. Choose any number of creatures within range. For the duration, each target has advantage on Wisdom saving throws and death saving throws, and regains the maximum number of hit points possible from any healing.

Or:

Boots of Elvenkind. While you wear these boots, your steps make no sound, regardless of the surface you are moving across. You also have advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks that rely on moving silently.

Because advantage doesn’t stack, however, tension is created between the designer’s utility and the DM’s utility: If a character has hard-coded advantage from equipment or racial abilities or whatever, the DM immediately loses the ability to meaningfully model the game world through advantage and the player is simultaneously discouraged from engaging with the game world in order to create favorable circumstances.

This is not a desirable outcome: Basically every time the game hard-codes advantage in this way, it makes the game less interesting in actual play.

Numenera recognizes the same basic problem, which is why it provides two asset “slots.” The solution is not quite so straightforward for 5th Edition because there are so many pieces of equipment, for example, that provide identical forms of advantage, that simply providing two slots will simply create min-max builds that stack multiple advantage and still shut down situational creativity (because both slots will already be filled).

But we can find a solution, I think, through parallel thinking. And by simply cutting straight to the heart of the matter.

SITUATIONAL ADVANTAGE

Situational advantage is any advantage which is derived from a character’s immediate circumstances; particularly and specifically those cases of advantage resulting from characters taking actions or positioning themselves in order to create specific situations which grant them advantage.

Situational advantage, and only situational advantage, stacks with other advantage:

• If you have hard-coded advantage (e.g., the advantage against poison damage from dwarven resilience) and situational advantage (e.g., the character manages to dilute the poison before being forced to swallow it), then you roll 3d20 and take the best result.
• One source of disadvantage can cancel EITHER all hard-coded advantage or all situational advantage, but not both. (So if you have all three, you’d still have advantage and roll 2d20 while keeping the best result.)
• If you have two or more sources of disadvantage, then they will cancel both hard-coded and situational advantage. (You would simply roll 1d20 and resolve the action check normally.)

Note that not all forms of advantage appearing in the rulebook are necessarily hard-coded. Some describe situational advantage. (The optional rules for flanking, for example.)

What about advantage from spells? Is the advantage provided by a spell situational? There is a potentially simulationist argument that they are (or perhaps that some subset of them are, although that way probably lies madness). But the primary meta-game point of all this is to encourage players to think creatively as they engage with the game world instead of just throwing a prepackaged block of mechanics at a problem.

And a spell, after all, boils down to a prepackaged block of mechanics.

So if I had to make an ironclad rule, I would say that advantage from spells is always considered hard-coded advantage.

Fortunately, the entire point of situational advantage is to prevent hard-coded rules from disempowering the GM. So I will by happy to override this ironclad rule whenever players think creatively in order to create situational advantages from their spells. For example, by using a create food and water spell to water down the poison before it’s fed to the dwarf.

Go to Part 1

In Part 5B: Finding Floon, I focused on restructuring the investigation into Floon’s disappearance starting with Volo hiring the PCs to find his missing friend. But that actually picks up the thread just after the Dragon Heist campaign begins. The action actually kicks off with a short sequence in which the PCs witness some Xanatharian NPCs pick a fight with a Zhentarim and then, three rounds into that altercation, a troll erupts out of the portal in the Yawning Portal with a nest of stirges clinging to its back.

It’s a good moment. Nothing wrong with that scene.

But when, thanks to the ingenuity of the wider Dragon Heist DM community, I was able to find a minor restructuring and enhancement of the sequence that, when I launched my own run of the campaign, worked really, really, really well. So I’m offering it as an addendum to the Dragon Heist remix.

STEP ONE – FIRST STEPS: During character creation, let your players know that they’re aiming to create characters who are already working together as a group. (They may have just come together for the first time, but they have, in fact, decided to work together.) You might even tell them that the first moment of the campaign will be as they step through the doors of the Yawning Portal looking to meet with their contact: They need to figure out how to weave their backgrounds together to reach that point.

In my campaign this took the form of Pashar, whose mother had been captured by pirates, and Kittisoth, a tiefling pirate who was a part of that crew, but became friends with Pashar while he was in captivity. Pashar had been released to bring back a 30,000 gp ransom for their mother and Kittisoth accompanied him. On their way to Waterdeep, they had run into Theron, a wild elf in the Ardeep Forest, who was touched by their plight and agreed to help them.

(Slight wrinkle here: Pashar been told that the ransom was “600 harvest moons.” Failing to realize that a harvest moon is worth 50 gp, he was under the impression he was seeking a 600 gp ransom… not a 30,000 gp ransom. Those who agreed to help him before the truth came out were somewhat nonplussed.)

Upon reaching Waterdeep, Kittisoth decided that a great way to make money would be to compete in the seeding brackets for Xanathar’s underground fighting tournaments. She sought out Edana, the fourth PC, who set her up with a fight, but she was then badly injured during the fight. Edana was able to make introductions to the fifth and final PC, Kora Marwood, who was both a cleric of Mystra (and could heal the injured would-be fighter) and a Harper agent who had been looking to form a crew of her own. She told them that, if they were looking for fast coin, she had a job they could all attempt together, and they headed for the Yawning Portal.

STEP TWO – FRIENDLY FACES: Show them the “Friendly Faces” handout on p. 221 of Dragon Heist and ask them to choose one of the characters pictured there. That’s the contact they’re coming to meet. You can chat a little bit about how they know them, or just jump into it.

STEP THREE – GANG TROUBLE: Before they have a chance to really start talking with their contact, however, the conflict between Yagra Stonefist and the Xanatharians begins at the table next to theirs. (Unless they picked Yagra Stonefist, in which case the trouble comes straight at them.) This is detailed on p. 21 of Dragon Heist.

Add a black flying serpent tattoo to the back of Yagra’s neck. (Note: She isn’t a Manshoonian Zhentarim; she’s with the Doom Raiders.)

Note: If they’ve selected Bonnie or Threestrings as their contact, then they’re working. Perfect excuse for them to say, “Get a table and I’ll come see you in a minute.”

STEP FOUR – A BRIEF DISCUSSION: The bar brawl resolved, the PCs have a chance to briefly talk with their contact. Turns out they’re just brokering a meeting with someone who needs the PCs’ services, and their contact hasn’t shown up. They buy the PCs a round of drinks while they wait, and that’s when—

STEP FIVE – DIP! DIP! DIP! DIP! DIP!: A chant of, “Dip! Dip Dip!” starts up in one corner of the bar and quickly spreads through the whole crowd. A young man stands up, goes to the bar, and slaps down a gold piece. Durnan nods, slides the coin off the bar, and then gives him a wooden cup and a silver bell.

The young man strips down to his underwear as the dipping song begins:

THE DIPPING SONG
Deep and dark down below,
where only fools and braggarts go,
where monster roam and dangers mortal,
few survive the Yawning Portal,
stand your ground or ring the bell,
and hope you make it up the well!

Then the young man goes over to the portal. At the edge of the portal he quaffs a beer, throws the cup down the portal, and grabs the rope. His friends begin lowering him.

Betting: Instantaneously the betting strats. (“Two silver he stays down for three minutes!” and “A copper he comes up with the cup!” That sort of thing.)

Return: After one minute, people start grumbling unhappily and others cheer; coins are exchanged as bets begin getting resolved. Two minutes pass; maybe there’s a chance for the PCs and their contact to exchange a few more words. (“So that is this all about?” “I’m not sure. But it might have something to do with this Zhent-Xanathar gang war that’s been flaring up.”)

At almost three minutes, the sound of the bell echoes up from the hole. There are groans from those who almost won their 3 minute bets. The rope is pulled up.

Troll: The young man appears over the lip of the portal — one hand holding the rope, the other triumphantly holding the cup above his head. He alights on the side of the portal and begins walking away.

He’s ten feet away from the portal when the troll clambers up from below. The PCs can see that there’s something wrong with the troll’s back; the flesh there seems to writhe. Roll initiative!

1^st Round:

• The troll attacks the dipper.
• Durnan pulls a greatsword from below the bar, vaults over the bar, and charges forward.
• The Zhents who attacked Yagra (if they’re still around) make a break for the door (along with many others).

2^nd Round:

• The flock of 12 stirges on the troll’s back explode into a frenzied flight.
• If the PCs are involved, Durnan shouts, “You focus on the stirges! The troll is mine!”
• Yagra (if she’s still around) joins Durnan in fighting the troll.

Wrapping Up the Fight: As the PCs finish mopping up the stirges, Durnan will ram his shoulder into the troll, causing it to plunge backwards into the Yawning Portal and vanish from sight. Durnan shouts, “A round of drinks on the house! Troll special!” Cheers from those who braved it out erupt!

STEP SIX – VOLO: That’s when Volo comes over. He’s the colleague the PCs’ contact was waiting for. If the PCs interceded with the trolls/stirges, Volo saw the whole thing and he’s very impressed.

If they didn’t, it doesn’t matter. (It might even be funny to have him come in and say something like, “What did I miss?” or “Just another boring day at the Yawning Portal.”) He was already planning to hire them for the job based on their contact’s recommendation, right?

And you can pick up straight from there with Part 5B: Finding Floon.

CREDIT

On reddit, Busboy80 came up with the basic concept of the Dip and RVAthrowaway38 created the Dipping Song. I may have refined the sequencing, but this is a fantastically clever idea and my players loved it. Chants of, “Dip! Dip! Dip! Dip!” have become a running joke.

And thanks to my players: Heather, Peter, Chris, Sarah, and Erik.

This is the first entry in a new series I’m trialing here at the Alexandrian. Back in 2012, I wrote a series of essays about Game Structures in RPGs. A major component of this discussion concerned scenario structures – the macro-game structures which allow the GM to prep different aspects of their campaign world and different experiences for their players.

One of the specific things I discussed was the fact that when you try to prep a scenario using the wrong scenario structure, the result can be painful for everybody involved. You can see this with clearly wrong-headed ideas like running dungeon exploration as a linear timeline of events; running conversations using combat initiative; or trying to have players navigate a city as if it were a dungeoncrawl (by prepping every street with a keyed encounter and having the players make intersection-by-intersection navigation decisions).

This makes it truly unfortunate that most GMs don’t have a robust library of scenario structures that they can use to build their campaigns. In my experience, the vast majority of GMs are limited to just three structures:

1. Railroads
2. Dungeoncrawls
3. Mysteries

In actual practice it’s usually worse than this because many GMs don’t really understand how to structure mysteries, so they end up defaulting back towards railroads for their mystery scenarios. And even running a dungeoncrawl is no longer a reliable skill for many DMs because the gateway game, D&D, is no longer teaching it as a skill: The actual procedure by which a dungeoncrawl is run was significantly obfuscated in 3^rd Edition and was completely removed from the rulebooks for 4^th Edition.

The result is that GMs generally don’t even consciously realize what scenario structures are, so they end up just kind of muddling around using gut instinct and a random amalgamation of half-realized scenario structures they’ve picked up through osmosis, most or all of which are just various flavors of railroading.

So I obviously think it’s really important for GMs to make the conscious decision to think about the scenario structures they use, and make sure they’re using the right scenario structures for the scenarios they want to run (or which they need to run because of the decisions their players are making). One of the things that storytelling games have been doing very well compared to RPGs over the last ten to fifteen years is, in fact, spelling out specific procedures for GMs to follow.

As part of that original series on Game Structures, I also talked about designing custom game structures, using the example of how to design structures for running a campaign about a starship plying interstellar trade routes.

With this series I want to challenge myself – and you! – to do more of this. The truth is that even one of these structures unlocks the ability to confidently prep and run dozens of scenarios. When I figured out node-based scenario design, it meant that I could suddenly design and run incredibly complex mystery scenarios as a matter of simple routine. When I figured out the party planning structure for effectively running large social events, it was like opening a door to a room that I’d never even knew existed. What else is hiding out around here, lurking just within arms reach and yet somehow completely beyond our grasp because we’re blind to the possibility?

So this series is going to look at specific types of experiences and say, “How would you prep this – and then run this – for an RPG?” The results won’t have been playtested (yet!), so it’s possible that what we come up with won’t work in actual practice. But the goal will be to get specific enough to provide a concrete framework for prepping any number of scenarios. Or, if we run into something truly challenging, enough detail to spark meaningful analysis and discussion (similar to my Thinking About Urbancrawls series, which did, eventually, result in a specific structure being created).

I suspect that most of our challenges will be prompted from linear mediums like films, books, and comics, but real life could also easily provide examples. (Hexcrawls, for example, were born as much from the inspiration of real life expeditions like Shackleton or Marco Polo as they were from the travel sequences of The Lord of the Rings.)

Of course, some would-be “challenges” will have obvious answers: Sherlock Holmes? Well, Three Clue Rule with a side-helping of node-based scenario design. Next!

We’ll be skipping those.

Our goal is also not to specifically ape our point (or points) of inspiration: Even if we could create such a narrowly focused scenario structure, what would be the point? What we’re interested in is finding a structure that will allow us to create any number of similar experiences, preferably with so much flexibility that the results might end up looking absolutely nothing like our original inspiration. (Think about how something like Moria becomes the incredibly flexible structure of the dungeoncrawl, which in turn expands into the generic structure of the location-crawl, which can end up being used to model a technologically-riddled skyscraper in a cyberpunk setting.) The points of inspiration exist to help us think about and unlock that structure.

I’m also hoping that seeing my process of working through these challenges will also prove more generally useful by demonstrating the process by which I create and prep these structures.

Finally, I really do want to be challenged here. So if you have some tricky situation or a narrative example of an experience you’d like to create for your group, throw it my way, either in the comments here or via Twitter.

We’ll be getting stated on Wednesday with…

Raiding the Death Star!

SCENARIO STRUCTURE CHALLENGES
Challenge #1: The Death Star Raid
Challenge #2: Race to the Prize
Challenge #3: McGuffin Keep-Away
Challenge #4: Heists
Challenge #5: The RPG Montage
Challenge #6: Innkeepers

My poor inbox (which was already wallowing under an inundation of holiday e-mails I have been unable to keep on top of) has been getting hit hard this morning with people asking me what I think of the freshly announced 5th Edition of D&D.

Short answer: I don’t really think anything about it. We know absolutely nothing about it, after all.

Slightly longer answer: According to ENWorld, the news was leaked to them in “early winter last year” and, at that time, the game had been “under development for some time” (to the point where they had a rough rules draft ready for playtesting by the press).

From this, it’s pretty easy to conclude what was already obvious when Slavicsek left the company and they started cancelling products: The Essentials product line was deemed an immediate failure by WotC . (Just as the early release of the Essentials rulebooks in 2010 told you that 4th Edition, as a whole, had failed.)

LOOKING AHEAD

I’ve said in the past that I currently don’t see a winning business strategy for WotC with a 5th Edition. Unsurprisingly, nothing I’ve heard in the last three hours has changed that opinion.

It should be relatively self-evident that the goal of a 5th Edition at this juncture is to re-unify the D&D customer base. (All the talk of “unity” in the announcement, of course, only confirms this.) But for all the talk about a “public playtest” and “asking D&D fans what they want in a new edition”, I’m not really seeing the mechanism by which 5th Edition solves WotC’s problems.

WotC, ultimately, faces an immutable truth: No reboot edition of an RPG has ever succeeded unless there is clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction in the existing customer base. And, as far as I can tell, there is no such dissatisfaction in the 4th Edition customer base. The biggest gripes they seem to have (if any) are the mini-revision of Essentials, the lackluster DDI support, and the lack of printed supplements. None of those complaints suggest a deep dissatisfaction with the system itself (quite the opposite, in fact).

Of course, there is widespread dissatisfaction with 4th Edition among players of previous editions. But that doesn’t actually help WotC.

Basically, the current D&D customer base consists of three broad groups:

(1) 3rd Edition players (either using the original rulebooks or having migrated to Pathfinder). These players, almost by definition, have said, “We’re happy with what we’ve got.” Which isn’t to say that many of them, including myself, aren’t open to new experiences. But the only way WotC can appeal to them en masse is to restore classic 1974-2008 D&D gameplay to 5th Edition.

(2) Unfortunately, restoring the classic gameplay of D&D is almost guaranteed to alienate the existing 4th Edition players.

(3) Finally, you’ve got a relatively small contingent of old school players. These guys are inherently even more conservative than the 3rd Edition players and, frankly, it’s impossible to publish anything new that will appeal to them en masse.

Honestly, I think the most likely outcome is that WotC will produce a game which attempts to return to classic D&D gameplay. But in an effort not to lose their existing 4th Edition players, they’ll try to strike a compromise between the two. The result may or may not be a great game, but commercially it will almost certainly fail: 3E players will reject the 4E elements and stick with the best-supported RPG in history. 4E players will reject a return to “wizard win buttons” and other spherical cows (which will presumably be even less true in 5E).

Things get worse when WotC cancels DDI support for 4th Edition (which seems likely) and creates another group of disenchanted customers who feel alienated and betrayed. Without an OGL to fall back on, a large percentage of this group will exit the game industry entirely.

Basically, my prediction here is that WotC will split their existing 4E fanbase (to one degree or another). They will pick up a relatively insignificant portion of the 3E and OSR fanbases. In short, WotC produces a 5E which performs even worse in the marketplace than 4E.

Things that could mitigate this doomsday prediction:

(1) WotC starts mending fences in really meaningful ways. Specifically, they need to look long and hard at some of the really unpopular decisions they’ve made and work to reverse them: Put previous edition PDFs back on sale. Make Dragon and Dungeon available in print again (even if it’s just POD).

(2) Reach out aggressively for new customers. I don’t know exactly what form this takes, but if WotC can find a way to replenish their customer base with new players then the continued schisming of the RPG marketplace won’t be as significant.

(3) Part of that, however, might be revamping the core products and methodology of your product line. Finding a way to truly abandon the proven failure of the supplement treadmill burnout cycle would also help.

(4) Restore the OGL.

There are also, unfortunately, a lot of things WotC could do that would make things worse.

WHAT WOULD I LIKE?

In an ideal world, I would like the version of D&D that became a missed opportunity in 2008. I talked about it a little bit here:

That’s the missed opportunity here: WotC had the chance to polish and improve Classic D&D; to take the next step with the game. Instead, they side-stepped and gave us New D&D instead.

Meanwhile, Paizo couldn’t make those changes with Pathfinder while simultaneously stepping into the void vacated by WotC.

In short, keep the core gameplay of D&D, fix the handful of problematic abilities at low levels, revamp high level play so that it doesn’t fall apart. Grab the utility of page 42 without the railroading advice and implement a cleaner/quicker system for creating monsters and NPCs.

I would also:

• Look to the OSR and reintroduce game structures that have been slowly stripped out of the game for the past 30 years.
• Embrace the D&D core sets strategy I’ve talked about previously featuring a stripped-down system very similar to what Legends & Labyrinths looks like.
• I would re-introduce the AD&D brand name to produce a Player’s Handbook, a Dungeon Master’s Guide, and a Monster Manual. These would be 100% compatible with the D&D product line. (If you’ve got a D&D module, you can run it in AD&D without conversion. If you create a monster with AD&D, you can run it in D&D. If you’ve got a D&D character, you can start using the AD&D character creation rules any time you level up. And so forth.)
• I’d go back to Dancey’s concept of “evergreen” products and try to make it work by focusing my actual supplement line on opening up new game structures. For example, I wouldn’t produce a book of “rules for ships”. Rules for ships are worthless unless you have a game structure that involves being on ships. What needs to be developed is a game structure for “being pirates” that’s as effective as the game structure for “being dungeoncrawlers”. Pull that off successfully and you’ll have created an entirely new market for adventure products.
• I’m hoping that I can buck the burnout pattern of the supplement treadmill by locking adventure content, rule content, and physical goodie content together into the boxed sets. If that doesn’t pan out, I’d just turn the boxed sets into limited editions and cycle them out of print.
• I would probably do everything in my power to avoid publishing splatbooks like Complete Warrior or Arcane Power. These books are not only the metastatic cancer of the supplement treadmill, but they make it actively more difficult for people to embrace non-“core” classes because the non-core classes never receive the same support. I’d rather have people reach for new experiences rather than glutting and then sating themselves on the supplement treadmill for fighters and wizards.
• Bring back the OGL if the legal department will let me get away with it.

If we got my “perfect edition”, would it make 5th Edition a success? Unfortunately, no. I believe it probably would have been a huge success in 2008 (particularly if released under the OGL) when the D&D trademark would have helped transition existing players to it.

But in 2011, at least half of WotC’s former market no longer has any loyalty to WotC or the D&D trademark. There is no easy mechanism for leveraging those players into a new edition, which means that you’re competing not only with their existing investment (of time, money, and experience) but with the most expansive library of support material ever produced for an RPG.

Technoir uses a simple core mechanic in which verbs are used to push adjectives onto characters. (For example, you might use your character’s Hack verb to push the adjective “exploited” onto a gunrunner’s security system.) That may look a little gimmicky, but it actually seems like a really slick little system.

What I find particularly notable about this is that it mechanically articulates and reinforces a procedure that I use almost constantly when I’m refereeing in virtually any system: When a player proposes an action with an uncertain outcome, the action is mechanically resolved using the rules of the game. Then I consider how that outcome has shifted the status quo and carry that knowledge forward as additional actions are proposed and resolved. I’m intrigued to see how a system that feeds directly into this process will perform in play: Will it piggyback it? Reinforce it? Interfere with it? Enhance it?

I’ll probably have more to say about Technoir once I’ve had a chance to actually play it, but my read-thru of the rulebook actually got me thinking about something completely different that I want to touch on today: Skill challenges in 4th Edition.

Technoir structures its core mechanic into Sequences using a very simple system of turn-taking. The trick to resolving sequences is pretty simple: Because adjectives are meaningful, the GM can use his common sense to know when a sequence ends (because the adjectives that have been applied will either result in the players being successful or unsuccessful in achieving their goal). This works because you can’t just slap adjectives on willy-nilly; you need to establish the proper vector by which the adjective can be applied. (In other words, you need to explain what actions you’re taking to achieve the objective.)

The result is that adjectives both arise naturally from the game world and also strictly describe the game world. As a result, sequences build organically and logically to unforeseen conclusions.

The system is, as far as I can tell, incredibly flexible and can be applied to almost any conflict (or what Technoir refers to as a “contention”): Hacking, seduction, combat, interrogation, tracking, chases, etc.

In other words, Technoir‘s sequences have the same mechanical goal as 4th Edition’s skill challenges (resolving discrete chunks of action in a structured format). But skill challenges are the polar opposite of Technoir‘s sequences:

First, whereas Technoir trusts the creativity and common sense of the players at the table to determine when a goal has been achieved (or thwarted), 4th Edition’s skill challenges hard-code a success-or-failure condition which is completely dissociated from the game world. Or, as Technoir puts it:

After any turn is taken and an action is performed, everyone at the table should look at what’s happening in the fiction. As I said before, there’s no score. You have to decide for yourselves when this ends. Each player should respect the adjectives that have been applied and removed and decide what her protagonist wants now — no matter what hse came into the scene wanting. You should do the same for your antagonists. You might find that one side got what they cam for and is done. Or that the two sides are now willing to compromise. Or that there are no good vectors for attacks any more. Look for new ways out of the situation. Maybe it’s time to stop rolling dice and cut to a new scene.

But if there is still something to contend over, go on to the next turn and play out the next action.

Technoir cares intimately and enthusiastically about what your characters have done, why they’ve done it, and what they’ve accomplished by doing it. 4th Edition’s skill challenges, on the other hand, don’t give a crap about any of that: If you haven’t rolled four successes yet, then your characters haven’t succeeded (no matter what they’ve achieved with those checks). And if you have rolled four successes, then your characters have totally succeeded (even if their actions haven’t actually achieved that yet).

Second, Technoir‘s system inherently gives freedom of choice to the players. They set their goals, determine their actions, and even demand their outcomes. (Of course, those demands may not always be satisfied.) Despite several years of constant errata and house rules attempting to soften 4th Edition skill challenge’s away from the rigid railroad presented in the original Dungeon Master’s Guide, the system is still inherently antithetical to player choice. For example, here’s a key quote from the presentation of skill challenges in D&D Essentials Rules Compendium:

Each skill challenge has skills associated with it that adventurers can use during the challenge. (…) Whatever skills the DM chooses for a skill challenge, he or she designates them as primary or secondary. A typical skill challenge has a number of associated skills equal to the number of adventurers plus two.

Incredibly, skills that players want to use that the DM hasn’t pre-approved can never be considered primary skills and are automatically considered inferior (they can count for no more than one success and may not count for successes at all). By default, 4th Edition tells you that ideas originating from the players are not to be treated with the same respect as ideas originating from the DM. It’s hard-coded right into the rules.

The two approaches really are night and day: Technoir trusts the creativity of the players. 4th Edition shackles the creativity of the players.