The complete set of Playtesting 4th Edition posts have been compiled into a single essay for easy reference and linkage. This pretty much constitutes my definitive statement on the system. I have a couple more sessions of Keep on the Shadowfell to play through with one of my groups and, if anything of note comes up during those sessions, I may post a coda of some sort.

But both of my gaming groups have decided to return to 3rd Edition and stay there. And, at this point, I don’t anticipate that I will ever be returning to 4th Edition. The game is, in the final analysis, not only poorly designed, but designed specifically with a philosophy which is antithetical to my roleplaying.

Other people may find enough interest in the game to spend the time necessary to fix the fundamental design flaws, but I don’t see any reason to waste my time with it.

(Oh, look! WotC just changed the DCs for skill checks again. I’m so glad they took such great pride in fixing the math with 4th Edition…. and fixing it… and fixing it… and fixing it… They’re like the Energizer Bunny of math fixing.)

Before I say anything else, let me say this: The Dark Knight is probably the best superhero movie ever made. It may also be the best movie of the year. It may even deserve a spot in the Top 100 movies of all time (but that depends on a few more viewings and some reflection).

I’m not one of those fanboys who confuse geekgasms with quality (although there’s nothing wrong with a good geekgasm), but The Dark Knight really is that good: The scripting, directing, and acting all come together to create something that’s thematically, dramatically, and cinematically complex and rewarding. Heath Ledger’s performance, alone, would make the movie worth watching again and again — and he’s just one jewel among many.

SPOILER WARNING

With that being said, however, I did have one major problem with the movie: The ending, while thematically powerful, makes absolutely no sense.

BATMAN: They must never know what he did.

GORDON: Five dead! Two of them cops! Three crooked mobsters! You can’t sweep that under the rug!

BATMAN: We’ll say that I did it.

GORDON: What?

BATMAN: Admittedly, I have no motive. Plus everyone knows I don’t kill people. And there’s absolutely no way that you could know that I was responsible for these killings and I have absolutely no reason to confess it to you, but I think you should get on your radio right now and call it in.

GORDON: But Harvey is lying dead right here. And I haven’t even had time to get the story straight with my family. And what possible explanation could I give for my family being here anyway?

BATMAN: No. This has to happen. I can be this guy. I can be the Dark Knight. Call it in!

GORDON: … I’m sorry, were you still talking? I was just thinking about the hundreds of people — including dozens of cops and mobsters — that the Joker has killed all over the city in the past 24 hours.

BATMAN: What about them?

GORDON: Oh! Hey! Here’s an idea. If we’re going to cover up the truth anyway, how about we just blame the Joker?

BATMAN: Oh. Yeah. I guess that makes a lot more sense. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinkiing.

GORDON: It’s okay. You’ve been hit in the head a lot today.

Oh, wait. I’m sorry. That’s not the actual ending of the movie. That’s just the Way It Should’ve Ended.

But, seriously, the ending of the movie bugged me. This type of logical plot hole usually bugs me, but I think it particularly stood out in the case of The Dark Knight because the rest of the movie was so unmitigatingly perfect. It’s like the difference between seeing a fly land on your hot dog during a picnic and seeing a fly in your soup at a $100-per-plate restaurant.

But I think it also stands out because this particular plot point was being used to tie together the thematic content of the entire film. And that thematic content was rich and powerful, so seeing it become fatally flawed at (literally) the last minute was very disappointing for me. It was like watching Achilles get shot in the heel.

And, to be sure, it would be very difficult to have corrected this problem without losing the thematic closure of the film. Off-hand, I think the only solution would have been to have Two-Face bring together everyone he felt was responsible for Rachel’s death in order to determine their fate. (This would have put Batman at the scene of the murders, made it more important for a scapegoat to be found, and allowed for the creation of a plausible narrative — mobsters and crooked cops kill Harvey Dent, Batman takes revenge.) By opting for the more streamlined approach of having Two-Face kill them (or spare them) in a series of encounters, the narrative is simplified… but, unfortunately, it’s simplified to the point of making it nonsense.

Is this a nit? Yes.

But I can also draw a direct line between this foible of The Dark Knight and a similar problem with Batman Begins: Specifically, the scene in Ra’s al Ghul’s compound at the end of Bruce Wayne’s training when he’s asked to execute a murderer and refuses. Again, this is a thematic lynchpin for the movie. And, again, it makes no bloody sense.

BRUCE: I won’t execute this man. I am not a killer… And because I’m not a killer, I will KILL ALL OF YOU.

… say what?

I guess we’re supposed to give him a pass because he saves the life of Ra’s al Ghul. But, oddly enough, the theme of the movie is a little less powerful when interpreted as “I’m different than the criminals because I won’t kill anyone played by a recognizable movie star”.

I have similar problems with the end of Batman Begins, which suffers from two gaping holes in its logic:

(1) You have a machine which vaporizes water inside metal pipes buried underground… but has no effect on any of the fleshy bags of water wandering the streets of Gotham. (By “fleshy bags of water”, of course, I mean “human beings”.) I don’t have a problem swallowing super-technology in a superhero movie, but could you at least try not to insult my intelligence?

(2) Batman seems to consistently suffer a lobotomy at the end of these movies:

BATMAN: I have a plan. Wait until the train that’s a couple blocks away starts moving. Then you drive the Batmobile and race the train towards Wayne Tower. Just before it gets there, blow up the pylons nearest to Wayne Tower and cause the entire train to collapse.

GORDON: And what will you be doing?

BATMAN: I’ll be on the train, fighting a largely meaningless battle with Ra’s al Ghul.

GORDON: Or — and this is just an idea mind you — why don’t you just get back in the Batmobile right now and blow up the train pylons we’re practically standing right next to. Or any of the other pylons between here and Wayne Tower.

BATMAN: Huh, that’s actually a pretty good idea.

GORDON: Or I could just place a quick call to Wayne Tower and tell them to cut the power supply to the tracks.

BATMAN: Huh. Okay, that’s an even better idea. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.

GORDON: It’s okay. You’ve been hit in the head a lot today.

These were not my only problems with Batman Begins: The character of Rachel — although powerfully redeemed in The Dark Knight — was a complete waste in Batman Begins. Batman’s willingness to engage in mass property destruction with seemingly little regard for the consequences or the lives that might be lost was not only disturbing, but also unnecessary and thematically inappropriate. Also, the destruction of Wayne Manor seemed wasteful and pointless.

But there’s also a part of me that feels a trifle Scrooge-like in making these (perfectly legitimate) critiques, because there is so much to love about both these movies. Batman Begins may be a significantly flawed film, but it’s also a very good film. And The Dark Knight, as I have already mentioned, may have one glaring imperfection, but is otherwise one of the best movies ever made.

I am particularly entranced with Nolan’s thematic exploration of the Batman mythos.

For example, the concept of “fear” has always lain at he heart of Batman’s origin. In Detective Comics #33, the original telling of that origin, we can read:

WAYNE: Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night. Black, terrible… a… a…

–as if in answer, a huge bat flies in the open window!

WAYNE: A bat! That’s it! It’s an omen… I shall become a BAT!

And thus was born this weird figure of the dark… This avenger of evil. The BATMAN.

And so it was perfectly natural for Batman Begins to put the words “I shall turn fear against those who prey on the fearful” into the mouth of Bruce Wayne. But giving Wayne himself the fear of bats as a young child and then having that fear create the situation that results in the death of his parents is a master-stroke. It allows Nolan to thematically ground Batman’s origin story into a character arc of overcoming and then inverting that fear.

This achievement by itself — taking an existing theme of the character and deepening it — is impressive. But Nolan doubles down again and again by exploring the concept, theme, and use of “fear” from as many angles as possible: Ra’s al Ghul, the Scarecrow, and Carmine Falcone all use fear in different ways. Gotham City itself is described repeatedly as a place of fear. And, of course, the entire plot is driven by fear in its many aspects.

When you create a work of art that explores a theme as deeply and richly as Batman Begins explores the concept of “fear”, the work can take on a life of its own. Beyond whatever statement Nolan himself might have been trying to make, the work itself is so complex and comprehensive in its treatment of the subject that the audience will find its own meanings reflected in the material. Different people will find different aspects of the movie resonating for them in different ways. And this also makes it a movie that’s not just fun to watch again, but rewarding to watch again.

We see a similar thematic exploration and expansion on multiple levels in The Dark Knight. The title itself alludes to this as the movie creates a contrast between the White Knight (Dent) and the Dark Knight (Batman).

Even the rivalry between Batman and the Joker is deepened. There has, of course, always been a sick and twisted dance between the two characters. One doesn’t have to look any farther than the Joker’s death in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns to see that. But when Ledger’s Joker says, “I think you and I are destined to do this forever.” It’s a haunting moment that rings painfully true.

And I think the reason it rings so painfully true is because Nolan has done such a remarkably effective job, throughout the entire film, of establishing this as the confrontation that happens when “an unstoppable force meets an immovable object” in the “fight for this city’s soul”.

When Nolan plays these themes — the Joker vs. the Batman; the White Knight vs. the Dark Knight; the corruptible vs. the incorruptible — against each other, the resulting tapestry is woven together into a deeply moving and deeply meaningful narrative.

I’ve already seen The Dark Knight twice. But it’s a movie that I will need to see many more times before I’ll be able to truly appreciate the depth and subtelty of Nolan’s accomplishment. And it will always be a movie that rewards another viewing… no matter how many viewings I’ve given it.

COLLECTED EDITION OF AN ESSAY BY JUSTIN ALEXANDER

It seems crazy to say this, but I’ve been talking about Keep on the Shadowfell since May. That’s a lot of time to dedicate to a single adventure. But, of course, a lot of this time has also been spent reading, analyzing, playing, and talking about the 4th Edition ruleset.

This essay is going to be about my playtesting of 4th Edition. Understanding these comments may require a little bit of context, however. So let’s start with that.

When 4th Edition was first announced in August 2007, I posted some Thoughts on 4th Edition. These primarily consisted of three points: (1) What WotC says about a new edition and what a new edition actually does are frequently two completely different things. (2) The design ethos being espoused at WotC did not fill me with confidence. (3) I wasn’t going to draw any conclusions until I actually had the rules in my hands.

In May of this year I wrote a series of essays on Dissociated Mechanics. These essays were written before 4th Edition was released, but provided a detailed dissection and analysis of what I still believe to be a serious flaw in the design ethos at WotC.

After the rulebooks were released, I revisited the subject of Skill Challenges. I was over-hasty in my reading of certain rules, but also far too forgiving in others (check the comment thread attached to that post).

If you’ve looked through some of this material, it will be clear that I had some serious reservations about 4th Edition. But I was also determined to approach the new system with an open mind. Ultimately you can talk a game to death, but it lives or dies in the playtest.

My initial intention was to take Keep on the Shadowfell and use the Quick Start Rules to play 4th Edition right out of the box — just as the designers intended it. I had high expectations that, with Mike Mearls and Bruce Cordell writing it, I would be able to just pick up the adventure and run it. Unfortunately, my first impressions of the module left me fairly disenchanted, and the 12-part series of remix essays should give some idea of the amount of work I had to put into the module before I felt comfortable running it.

Eventually, however, I was ready to go. And I have now run two separate playtests of the module: One for a group of experienced D&D players (my regular group) and another for a group of newbies (some of whom had never played an RPG before).

So let’s talk about my first reactions to playing 4th Edition.

QUICK LINKS

Combat
Running Combat
Characters
The Nova Cycle
Dissociated Mechanics
Skill Challenges
Gutting Non-Combat
Balance and Prep
D&D is Dead, Long Live 4th Edition

Read more »

Go to Part 1

I want to talk for a moment about my own personal history with D&D. I’ve previously described on this site how I first got into roleplaying games. I still remember walking into Pinnacle Games in Rochester, MN and seeing the five D&D boxed sets — the Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortal boxes — spread out rainbow-like along the top of a shelf. I spent months saving my allowance money in order to buy one boxed set after another, with each new purchase expanding the scope and depth of the game for me.

This was during the summer and fall of 1989, and it wasn’t long before I had picked up the AD&D 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. Then I picked up a used copy of the 1st Edition Monster Manual, which I used in conjunction with the 2nd Edition rulebooks for nearly half a decade until the hardcover Monstrous Manual was released in 1993.

During this half-decade span, I was playing with classmates and discussing the game in a variety of online forums, most notably the ADND FidoNet echo. I remember fondly people like Bruce Norman, John Givler, Bruce Norman, Alesia Chamness, Linda Rash, Alaeseus Starbreeze, David Bolack, Laurie Brown, Dr Pepper, and many others. It was here that I first encountered the concept of PBeM campaigns, and watching multiple games play out in slow motion across the echo helped shape my perceptions of what roleplaying games were capable of. When Bruce Norman got an adventure published in Dungeon Magazine, it inspired me to start submitting my own work. John Givler’s prodigious output of homebrewed items, spells, and monsters taught my kit-bashing by example.

(If anyone reading this has text archives from those days, I’d love to hear about it. Mine are fragmentary and incomplete.)

In short, I was young and I was excited by my hobby.

But there was also something else happening during this time period: A growing dissatisfaction with AD&D. Why were the core mechanics such an inconsistent and random jumble? Why couldn’t wizards wear armor (even if they weren’t casting spells)? Why was the alignment system so punitive? Why did demi-humans have level caps? Why was there both a multi-classing system and a dual-classing system that produced such blatantly unbalanced results? And so forth. (This really just scratches the surface.)

And like a lover who has become discontented with his mistress, the existence of so many faults quickly made other foibles and quirks intolerable. Classes instead of a skill system? Vancian spellcasting instead of spell points? Hit points instead of a wound system? Pshaw.

I was hardly alone. Everyone I knew who played AD&D — both online and offline — had campaigns chock full of house rules trying to fix the foibles of the game. In the end, I was playing a version of AD&D using a binder of house rules thicker than the core rulebooks. And eventually I grew sick of doing it. By the late ’90s, I had stopped playing the game entirely.

Then, in 1999, the development of 3rd Edition was announced. I was skeptical and cynical beyond belief. And when Ryan Dancey announced his plans for the Open Gaming License, I found the entire concept absurd: The busted, archaic, creaky mechanics of AD&D were going to take the roleplaying industry by storm? Why would anyone use those rules as a platform for development? I got involved in countless online debates, scoffing at the entire concept.

And then Ryan Dancey did something really audacious: In response to my relentless criticism and skepticism, he made me a playtester and sent me a playtest copy of the Player’s Handbook.

So I read through the playtest document and I sent Dancey a lengthy list of comments. And then I playtested the game and sent him another list of comments. In short, I did my job.

And Dancey had done his: By the time I finished reading through the playtest document, I was sold on 3rd Edition. What I was holding in my hands was essentially the game I had been trying to create with my binder full of house rules: A unified core mechanic. A skill system coupled to a flexible class system. Arbitrary prohibitions replaced with logical consequences. It even took away with the alignment strait-jacket.

It wasn’t the perfect game. But it felt like the Platonic Ideal of AD&D that all of us had been struggling to find through our incessant house ruling.

And here was the real trick of it: It still played like D&D. It still felt like that game I had fallen in love with back in the summer of ’89 when I first peeled the shrinkwrap off the Basic Set.

Let me take a moment and explain what I mean by that: Yes, THAC0 was gone. Yes, the XP tables had been mucked with. Yes, the saving throw categories had been streamlined. Yes, skills and feats had been added to the game. In fact, the list of changes — if you wanted to be sufficiently nitpicky with it — could be almost endless.

But here’s the rub of it: Playing a fighter still felt like playing a fighter. Playing a wizard still felt like playing a wizard. And so forth.

Playing D&D3 felt as much like playing AD&D as AD&D had felt like playing BECMI.

Which — at the end of this long, winding road of nostalgia — brings me to my point:

4th Edition doesn’t play like D&D.

Some of the names are still the same, but playing a fighter doesn’t feel like playing a fighter and playing a wizard doesn’t feel like playing a wizard.

Is it still a paper ‘n pencil roleplaying game? Yes. Is it still about exploring dungeons and slaying dragons? Yes.

Does it play like D&D? No.

The gameplay has been fundamentally altered. In similar fashion, both Chess and Stratego are boardgames featuring a highly abstract presentation of war played out on a grid. But Stratego isn’t the same game as Chess… even if you package it in a box with the word CHESS written across it in big, bold letters.

Sure, 4th Edition has the Dungeons & Dragons trademark splashed across its covers. But it isn’t the same game — any more than Rolemaster or Earthdawn or Exalted (all fantasy roleplaying games) are the same game. Or would become the same game just because you slapped the same name on the cover. New Coke may have had the Coke trademarks on its can, but that didn’t make it the same soda.

It should be noted that this isn’t to be taken as indictment of 4th Edition. There’s absolutely nothing about being “not D&D” that necessarily makes it a bad game. There are plenty of great RPGs which aren’t D&D, and Stratego is a fun game even if it isn’t Chess.

But the fact that 4th Edition isn’t the same game I’ve been playing for nearly two decades does play a significant role in why I won’t be making the switch to 4th Edition.

Back in 2002, Ron Edwards coined the term “fantasy heartbreaker”. He used it to refer to all of those games which are the result of their creators believing that they’ve taken the mousetrap (i.e. D&D) and made it a little bit better. In some cases they may be right and in some cases they may be wrong but, as Edwards pointed out, they were all doomed to failure. Why? Well, here Edwards goes off into an ideological rant that I think rather misses the point. But, in my opinion, the primary reason can be boiled down to this:

If I wanted to be play a game like this, I might as well be playing D&D.

There are many reasons for that sentiment to hold true, but I think there are two major ones:

(1) It’s much easier to find a group playing D&D than it is to find a group playing any other RPG.

(2) Most roleplaying gamers are already familiar with D&D — they’ve already learned the game.

So why would you go to the effort of learning a new game and then convincing other people to learn a new game in order to achieve an experience that you can already largely accomplish with a game you know and for which it’s easy to find experienced players?

Now, to be clear: 4th Edition will not be a fantasy heartbreaker. It’s got the Dungeons & Dragons trademark, tons of marketing muscle, and plenty of people who were either dissatisfied with 3rd Edition or just like anything shiny and new. From a commercial standpoint, it’s going to be a huge success by the standards of the industry. (The only open question is (a) whether it will be as large of a success as it could have been if it had taken a different route and (b) whether it will be a success by WotC’s standards.)

But for me, personally, I look on 4th Edition in much the same way that I’ve looked at the many fantasy heartbreakers I’ve read and played over the years. Only moreso. The game I love is not to be found here, and the game that has replaced it beneath the same shiny trademark is (a) intentionally designed to be inferior at doing all of the things that I enjoy doing with D&D and (b) sloppily designed in some fairly fundamental ways. And even if that wasn’t true, 4th Edition has failed to offer any substantive improvements or innovations that would justify abandoning my existing mastery of 3rd Edition in order to learn a fundamentally different game (which is, nevertheless, attempting to scratch the same itch).

D&D is dead. Long live 4th Edition.

But not for me.

The Alexandrian is meant to be a place for sharing and promoting my creative work, reviews, and political thoughts, so I don’t generally do auto-biographical blogging. It’s not that I’m a necessarily private person — it’s just that this isn’t particularly the place for it.

But today I’m making an exception because, as life is often wont to do, I’m facing some hardships that are affecting my creative work.

To whit: I have Lyme disease.

I went symptomatic a couple of weeks ago and promptly went down to the local clinic. I’ve been getting dosed with amoxicillin (among other things) and I thought I would be able to kind of push my way through it.

But no such luck. My brain has been just slightly discombobulated enough to make writing difficult or impossible. Because I’ll have bad days and not-so-bad days, I’ve even had problems getting the Playtesting 4th Edition essays I had written before I went symptomatic posted on a consistent basis. (Although that’s at least partly because I’m still getting used to the new suite of software I’m using to update the website due to the computer crash I suffered near the beginning of the month.)

In short, July has been a pretty sucky month for me.

If I was a suspicious fellow, I’d say that Fate was punishing me for announcing a release date for Legends & Labyrinths. After having several products run into horrible development problems shortly after having release dates announced for them, when I started Dream Machine Productions I decided to never announce a project’s existence until it was completely finished and ready to be published.

I’ve broken that rule twice — once in a minor way and once in a major way (with L&L). Both times the project has ended up being delayed past the original release date (once because of factors completely external from myself and, now, because I haven’t finished the work).

Legends & Labyrinths will be released when it’s done (and done right). But I’m not going to make any promises about when that will be. Heck, until I’m actually feeling better I can’t even estimate when that will be.

Updates on the website are also likely to slow down once I get past the material I’ve already prepped. (Although I’m hoping fervently that I will actually be feeling better before that happens.)