Robert J. Schwalb has a post hypothesizing that 4th Edition would have been more widely accepted if it had been formatted differently.

Fourth edition’s presentation abandoned nearly everything familiar about the game’s look. Eight years of 3rd edition, I think, created strong expectations about how the game should read and since the game didn’t match the visual expectations, it certainly must not match the play experience.

He goes on to argue that 4th Edition wasn’t as big of a shift from D&D if you compare it to the proto-4th Edition supplements being published by Wizards in the last couple years of 3rd Edition (Tome of Battle, for example). This is true. But I think Schwalb is ignoring the fact that their proto-4th Edition supplements were bringing with them proto-4th Edition critiques even before 4th Edition was released.

Schwalb also includes a PDF of what 4th Edition powers might have looked like if they’d been formatted more like 3rd Edition spells and asks, “I wonder if those changes might have been more palpable had we shifted back toward the old presentation, even if doing so meant that the game would be harder to learn.”

I doubt it. Oh, I’ve seen some people comparing the new powers format to Magic: The Gathering cards and the like. But when you dig down into the real complaints people have about 4th Edition they tend to be either dissociated mechanics, abandoning the traditional D&D gameplay that existed from 1974-2008, dissatisfaction with the “miniatures are mandatory” combat, or some combination thereof.

Personally, I think 4th Edition has some great formatting. I’ve been completely sold on the idea that monster stat blocks should contain all the rules for running the monster since at least 2000 (when my earliest adventure prep notes for 3rd Edition prominently featured monster stat blocks modded to do just that).

So count me down pretty firmly in the camp of “I like the format, I don’t like the rules”.

And to that end, consider this small sampling of 3rd Edition wizard spells formatted with 4th Edition stylings:

(The red hand indicates that spell resistance applies.)

And here’s a 3rd Edition Goblin using a 4th Edition styled stat block structured similarly to my own revised stat blocks:

I doubt that such formatting would really have been a turn-off for anybody. (In fact, Paizo’s reformatting of spells for Pathfinder spells is not terribly dissimilar, albeit slightly more conservative.)

In fact, let me go one step further: Schwalb hypothesizes that 4th Edition might have been hurt by its radical formatting shift. I think the opposite is true. I think 4th Edition’s superior formatting has attracted people who would otherwise have stuck with 3rd Edition. Significant chunks of the utility 4th Edition gets praised for (like including all of the rules necessary for running a monster in the monster’s stat block) is stuff that can just as easily be done in 3rd Edition.

For Christmas I got a copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill. It’s a great little game. I don’t really have much to say about it at the moment, but I bring it up because the game ships with eight 6-sided dice which are marked as 1d3-1 (generating results of 0, 1, or 2 pips). At one point during the holidays we had the game half set-up when everyone got distracted by some other bit of family business, which left a couple of people mucking about with the dice.

In the process, I was struck with the idea for a silly little dice game that proved amusing enough that I present it here:

1. The first player rolls all 8 dice from Betrayal at House on the Hill.
2. The target number is 6. If you fail to roll 6 pips on your dice, you have lost and the other player scores a point.
3. If you have rolled more than 6 pips, you are allowed to remove a number of dice from the pool equal to the number of extra pips you rolled. (Example: If you roll an 8, you can remove 2 dice from the pool.)
4. Hand the remaining dice to the other player to roll. The target number remains 6.
5. When a player scores a point, the other player rolls all 8 dice and play continues.

We either played to 6 points or swapped in new players in a tag-team style.

Not exactly a high-strategy game, but a strangely satisfying combination of Horse with the random rote of War. Plus dice. (Dice are cool.)

Reading Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief was a fairly fascinating experience. Taken on its own merits, the novel is a perfectly acceptable piece of light fluffery. On the other hand, the Percy Jackson series is clearly a calculated effort to cash-in on the success of Harry Potter, and reading the novel from that point of view gives a great deal of insight into not only Riordan’s creative process, but also the elements that made Rowling’s work so successful.

Basically, Riordan seeks to invert the structure of Harry Potter in every part. Thus, Potter’s magical school becomes Jackson’s magical summer camp. Potter hates his mundane home life, so Jackson loves his. The friendly headmaster Dumbledore becomes the hostile camp master Dionysus. And so forth.

You can also see this inversion being carried out on the larger structural level of the plot: Potter generally stays at his school and adventure must seek him out. Jackson, on the other hand, must venture forth on grand quests.

In general, this model of wholesale inversion is probably more effective at keeping the series fresh than if Riordan had decided to simply ape Rowling. But once you’ve spotted the trick, it becomes depressingly predictable. It also creates deeper problems for Riordan.

For example, one of the really beautiful things about Hogwarts was the irony of a kid who wanted to go to school. It’s an inversion of the natural order, and thus – on a subtle yet fundamental level – reinforces the otherworldliness of Rowling’s milieu. But a kid who hates school and wants to go to a summer camp? It’s bland vanilla even before you get to the random grab-bag of camp activities that make Quidditch look like a reasonable sporting event. (Riordan tends to tell rather than show. He wants the summer camp to be really cool, but he never spends the narrative time there necessary to invest the reader as deeply as Percy himself is apparently vested.)

The Lightning Thief also calls attention to another aspect of Harry Potter that sets it apart from the great bulk of fantasy fiction: Harry Potter is utterly humble in his origins. He is not born with any special powers. The only prophecy which applies to him is essentially exhausted before he hits his first birthday. Everything we see him accomplish, he accomplishes through hard work, determination, study, and the assistance of friends well-earned. (In this he shares much in common with Bilbo and Frodo.)

Percy Jackson, on the other hand, is Born Awesome. He’s the son of one of the most powerful gods, and so he’s inherently more powerful than everyone else around him. Ta da! And whereas Potter has his one small advantage stripped from him midway through the series, Jackson simply continues to accumulate power through divine fiat. We never see him work for anything. Or earn anything. At most he occasionally digs deep to find his hero genes and then unleashes the raw potential of his authorially-granted I’m So Special status.

Ultimately, the Percy Jackson series is to Harry Potter what The Sword of Shannara is to The Lord of the Rings: Riordan mugged Rowling in a dark alley, rifled her pockets, and shuffled the stuff he found into a slightly different order while scraping off the serial numbers. In the process quite a bit of the original’s charm and depth has been lost, which is perhaps only to be expected when you’re dealing with a knock-off.

On the other hand, Riordan’s writing, despite its shortcomings, is better than early Terry Brooks. And he also finds his own unique sense of grandeur and mystery (whereas Brooks only managed to turn everything he touched to mediocrity in The Sword of Shannara). So while the comparison may be apt, it is not entirely fair.

So while I can’t strongly recommend The Lightning Thief, I also wouldn’t dissuade you from it. It’s a bit of light fun, and the series as a whole tends to improve as it runs its course.

GRADE: C

Rick Riordan
Published: 2005
Publisher: Hyperion
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 1423139494X
Buy Now!

Video games are the only medium in which longer length became an inherent selling point. Is it any wonder that even their best narratives are generally bloated, flaccid, and poorly paced? And then combined with bland, repetitive grinding gameplay activities?

You can see a similar pattern in the serialized novels of the 19th century: When authors are paid by the word, they have an incentive to produce more words. But this impulse, at least, was counteracted by the fact that their readers still wanted a good story and weren’t particularly concerned with length.

Only in video games do you see media consumers focusing on length-of-play as an important feature in and of itself.

A couple years ago I thought this trend might actually be reversing itself as Final Fantasy XIII came under criticism for being too long. But it doesn’t seem to be sticking yet.

A couple years ago I talked about the way in which “modern” encounter design had crippled itself by fetishizing balance, resulting in encounters which were less flexible, less dynamic, and less interesting. This trend in encounter design has, unfortunately, only accelerated. More recently, I’ve started referring to it as My Precious Encounter(TM) design — a design in which every encounter is lovingly crafted, carefully balanced, painstakingly pre-constructed, and utterly indispensable (since you’ve spent so much time “perfecting” it).

Around that same time, I was also talking about the Death of the Wandering Monster: The disconnect between what I was seeing at the game table and the growing perception on the internet that wizards were the “win button” of D&D. Even a casual analysis indicates that the “win button” wizard only worked if you played the game in a very specific and very limited fashion. Given all the other possible ways you could play the game, why were people obsessing over a method of substandard play that was trivially avoided? And, in fact, obsessing over it to such a degree that they were willing (even desperate) to throw the baby out with the bathwater in order to fix it?

The root problem which links both of these discussions together are the Armchair Theorists and CharOp Fanatics.

Now, let me be clear: Good game design is rooted in effective theory and strong mathematical analysis. Any decent game designer will tell you that. But what any good game designer will also tell you is that at some point your theory and analysis have to be tested at the actual gaming table. That’s why solid, effective playtesting is an important part of the game design process.

The problem with Armchair Theorists is that their theories aren’t being meaningfully informed or tested by actual play experiences. And the problem with CharOp Fanatics is that, in general, they’re pursuing an artificial goal that is only one small part of the actual experience of playing an RPG.

Among the favorite games of the Armchair Theorists is the Extremely Implausible Hypothetical Scenario. The most common form is, “If we analyze one encounter in isolation from the context of the game and hypothesize that the wizard always has the perfect set of spells prepared for that encounter, then we can demonstrate that the wizard is totally busted.”

Let’s call it the Spherical Cow Fallacy: “First, we assume a spherical cow. Next, we conclude that cows will always roll down hills and can never reach the top of them. Finally, we conclude that adventures should never include hills.”

Ever seen the guys claiming that wizards render rogues obsolete because knock replaces the Open Locks skill? That’s a spherical cow. (In a real game it would be completely foolish to waste limited resources in order to accomplish something that the rogue can do without expending any resources at all. It’s as if you decided to open your wallet and start burning $10 bills as kindling when there’s a box of twigs sitting right next to the fireplace.)

Another common error is to implicitly treat RPGs as if they were skirmish combat games. Ever notice how much time is spent on CharOp forums pursuing builds which feature the highest DPS (sic)? Nothing wrong with that, of course. But when you slide from “this is a fun little exercise” to believing that a class is “br0ken” if it doesn’t deliver enough DPS, then you’re assuming that D&D is nothing more than a combat skirmish game.

Another variant is Irrational Spotlight Jealousy. A common form of this is, “The rogue disables the trap while everyone sits around and watches him do it.” (In a real game, traps are either (a) more complicated than that and everyone gets involved or (b) take 15 seconds to resolve with a simple skill check. The idea that a game grinds to a halt because we took 15 seconds to resolve an action without everybody contributing is absurd.)

Then there’s the Guideline as God, which becomes particularly absurd when it becomes the TL;DR Guideline as God. This is the bizarre intellectual perversion of the CR/EL system I described in Revisiting Encounter Design in which the memetic echo chamber of the internet transformed some fairly rational guidelines for encounter design into an absolute mandate that “EL = EPL”. (For a non-D&D example, consider a recent thread on Dumpshock which featured a poster who considered the statement “when a corporation or other needs someone to do dirty work, they look to the shadowrunners” to be some sort of absolute statement and was outraged when a scenario included a corporation performing a black op without using shadowrunners.)

And when these fallacies begin feeding on each other, things get cancerous. Particularly if they become self-confirming when designers use their faulty conclusions as the basis for their playtests. Playtests, of course, would ideally be the place where faulty conclusions would be caught and re-analyzed. But playtests are like scientific experiments: They only work if they’ve been set-up properly.

For example, 4th Edition suffers as a roleplaying game because so much of the game was built to support the flawed My Precious Encounters(TM) method of adventure design. Proper playtesting might have warned the designers that they were treating 4th Edition too much like a skirmish combat game. But unlike the playtesting for 3rd Edition (in which playtesters were given full copies of the rules and told to “go play it”), the reports I’ve read about 4th Edition playtesting suggest that the majority of playtesters were given only sections of the rules accompanied by specific combat encounters to playtest. Such a playtest was designed to not only confirm the bias of the design, but to worsen it.

(Not a problem, of course, if you believe that D&D should be primarily a skirmish combat game.)

Personally, I think it’s time for a slaughtering of these spherical cows. Neither our games nor our gaming tables are well-served by them.