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.

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.

A person is going to make a cake. They have five or ten pounds of really good, premium quality cake flour. However, something inexplicable happens in their head when they’re putting it together, they think: “Sure, I can use this really good flour and have a really good cake, or I can stretch it a little and make it only a little less good by substituting a cup of sand for a cup of that really valuable flour…”

Corrollary disease: “This flour is soooo good that if I add a lot more of it, the cake will be that much better.”

DADHACKER
(2002/12/30)

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: The meme that D&D is all about “killing monsters and taking their stuff” is a caustic one.

In recent years, however, this meme has only gotten stronger, largely due to the design methodology flowing out of Wizards of the Coast. (Although there’s certainly a feedback-loop between WotC and the echo-chamber CharOp branch of the fandom which exacerbates the problem.) Pointing to the core design of 4th Edition is trivial, but it can also be clearly seen in the growing predominance of My Precious Encounters(TM) in WotC’s adventure design both before and after the switch to 4th Edition.

Wizards clearly thinks they’ve identified some really awesome flour, and they’re just going to keep pouring more and more of it into their cake mix.

In Treasure Maps & The Unknown I mentioned that setting “kill all the monsters” as the default goal of an adventure inherently funnels everything in the game through the combat system, drastically narrowing the range of potential gameplay. More generally, I’ve talked in the past about the fact that D&D used to support a “big tent” of playing styles and gameplay options and that WotC’s quest to “fix the math” and “find the sweet spot” has systematically shrunk that tent.

Unsurprisingly people left outside of D&D’s shrinking tent have been turning to other games in droves, reportedly allowing Pathfinder to tie or out-sell D&D in recent months. (A level of competition D&D has never experienced except when it was briefly out of print during TSR’s near-bankruptcy.)

But I digress. For right now, I want to delve a little deeper into the significant, debilitating effects of setting “kill all the monsters” at the sole pinnacle of D&D gameplay.

EXTRA CREDIT: CHOICE AND CONFLICT

Let me start with this:

The video is very well done, but if you don’t want to watch the whole video, allow me to summarize the key points. It’s talking about the importance of choice (“good games feature choice at every moment”), and in order to better understand choice it breaks player actions down into several categories:

1. Autonomic Actions. (Breathing, keeping your heart beating, etc.)

2. Reactions. (Pulling your hand away from a flame.)

3. Calculations. (Decisions based solely on reason: A choice between options in which there is a clear correct answer. For example, buying a game for $40 instead of $60 when it’s the exact same game. Or, in a more complicated fashion, choosing not to place your hand on a hot oven.)

4. True Choices. (Requiring the overcoming of internal conflict.)

“Without internal conflict there is no choice, only decisions.”

Or, to put it another way, true choice requires you to have two objectives which are put into conflict with each other. You have to choose whether to pursue Objective A while risking or abandoning Objective B, or vice versa.

The problem with many games, as the video points out, is that the player is frequently presented with only a single objective (or several objectives which don’t conflict with each other). At that point, there is no choice: There is only the calculation of the best possible method of achieving your objective and/or the testing of physical skill in order to achieve that outcome.

One type of choice you see in many game is an “incomplete information problem” — where calculations are turned into choices by forcing the player to make the decision before they have enough information to make a reliable calculation. (Tangent: You’ll occasionally see discussions where people claim that you can’t have meaningful choice unless the players are completely informed about what each choice means, but this is not generally true. And it’s only specifically true in the case of a complete tabula rasa in which the choice is nothing more than a random number generation — but such tabula rasa states are so utterly unlikely in any sort of real gameplay that it’s not really worth wasting our time fretting about them.)

The other type of choice, and the one I’m most concerned with here, is the “incomparable”. This is often found in character creation systems, where you have to choose between two options which cannot be directly compared with each other.

“The problem with many games,” as the video says. “Is that they mask calculations as incomparables.”

The example they point to is World of Warcraft, in which the talent trees of character advancement appear to contain a multitude of choices. But experienced players know that these talent trees conflate down to just a handful of “best builds”. Why? Because virtually all of your choices on the talent tree are aimed at increasing your DPS or your healing output.

In other words, the “choices” on the talent trees are not fundamentally different. They are all ways of achieving one particular goal, and therefore there will almost certainly end up being one or two “best ways” to achieve that goal (calculation).

CONFLICT

You see where I’m going with this, right?

When you focus the entirety of D&D on combat mechanics, you are simplifying the game down to a single goal. The effects of this are clear:

First, it creates a market for “best builds”. More than that, when certain builds become sufficiently “best” they effectively break the game: You either play those builds or you’re being outclassed by those who are playing those builds. (If you’re supporting multiple goals, on the other hand, the problem is lessened: There may be a “best build for X”, but since X isn’t the totality of the game it doesn’t invalidate other character builds. Which isn’t to say that you need to toss concept balance out on its ear, but it does significantly reduce the pressure to turn everything into identical, bland pablum.)

Second, you can “fix the math” all you want in an effort to make all builds equal. It doesn’t change the fact that you’ve eliminated meaningful choice from the core mechanics of your game. (It should go without saying, of course, that you can eliminate large swaths of meaningful choice while still leaving some choices intact.)

In short, you are reducing your game to a mere calculation.

CHOICE

In considering the importance of choice in game design, take a moment to ponder the meaningful distinction between Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe. (The former has meaningful choices; the latter is a mere calculation.) Or the distinction between War and Poker. (The former is pure chance; the latter has meaningful choice.)

With that being said, of course, choice isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of game design. For example, we embrace an element of chance in poker just as we embrace it in a typical RPG’s combat system.

But I do believe that, when compared to other games, choice is peculiarly important for roleplaying games. Because, in my opinion, choice is the defining quality of roleplaying games. I think the best definition of “roleplaying” is, in fact, “making choices as if you were your character”.

So when you begin removing choice from a roleplaying game, you are removing the entire reason for playing an RPG in the first place.

How much should a single character be allowed to accomplish in 1 turn?

What you’re looking for is a sweet spot.

On one end of the spectrum, you have: “That guy is able to do way too much before I get another turn.” (Munchkin Quest suffers from this, as described and fixed in my house rules.)

On the other end of the spectrum, you have: “I’m not able to do anything interesting this turn.” (Imagine a game of Monopoly in which you could either roll the dice to move or buy the property you landed on, but not both. The balance would not be appreciably altered, but I suspect the game would suffer nontheless.)

The reason games use interrupt actions — such as attacks of opportunity — is to widen the tolerance of the sweet spot: It allows you to design turns that are long/large enough to maximize the potential for “I can do something fun with my turn” while simultaneously preventing the “why can’t I do anything to stop him from that long sequence of actions?” problem.

The disadvantage of interrupt actions, however, is the complexity which arises from tracking the triggers which allow those interrupts to be used. (Attacks of Opportunity in 3rd Edition gave you a single interrupt action, but had a very lengthy list of possible triggers. Swift actions were later added to the game, giving you a plethora of interrupt actions to choose from; but these almost universally had the trigger of “whenever you want to do it”, which is very easy to keep track of. 4th Edition simplified the list of triggers for Attacks of Opportunity, but drastically increased the number of different interrupt actions in the game and gave most of them different triggering conditions — thus radically increasing the complexity of the game.)

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Imagine a 3E-style combat system in which every character gets a single standard action each turn. In addition, they have a single interrupt action which they can use at any time. (For example, to hit someone running past them or trying to run away from them.)

(If you wanted to keep full actions, you could allow them to be taken by any character using their interrupt action on their turn.)

The point is that you don’t define any trigger conditions for those interrupts: You don’t need to keep track of them (or try to avoid doing them). You simply use them whenever you want to and can do whatever you want with them. Theoretically, this would give you the flexibility to respond to actions on the battlefield as you choose, without the difficulty of trying to keep in mind all the possible trigger actions.

Certain effects could vary the number of interrupt actions a character has. For example, a haste spell might simply grant a character an extra interrupt action. (Although on a similar note, you’d probably want to prohibit spellcasting with an interrupt action. An added layer of complexity, but probably necessary for balance. There are almost certainly some other wrinkles to work through if you wanted to use a system like this.)

One of the key concepts of “(Re-)Running the Megadungeon” is that the goal of the adventure is not and cannot be to “clear the dungeon”. Such a goal would be as meaningless as a World War II game in which the goal was, “Kill all the Nazis.”

(I suppose, in a general sense, you actually could hold such a goal. It would be something like the ultimate instantiation of the hack ‘n slash campaign: There’s a dungeon over there. Go slash at it for awhile. The important thing, however, is that one cannot reasonably expect to achieve that goal. That’s just not going to hack it.)

The loss of this clear-cut goal is problematic because “clear the dungeon” has long since become the default tactical solution for virtually every scenario in D&D. Oh, it’s usually gussied up a bit. But you’d be surprised at how often everything boils down to “clear the dungeon”. For example:

• “The forces of chaos are marshaling for an assault on the last bastion of civilization?” “How do we stop it?” “Go to the Caves of Chaos and… clear the dungeon.” (B2 Keep on the Borderlands)
• “The corrupt mayor is planning to release the Yellow Sign and drive Freeport into madness!” “How do we stop it?” “Go to the Lighthouse and… clear the dungeon.” (Freeport Trilogy)
• “Slavers are kidnapping people off the streets!” “How do we stop them?” “Go to the slave pits and… clear the dungeon.” (Scourge of the Slave Lords)
• “The Giants are arming for war!” “How do we stop them?” “Go to their steading and… clear the dungeon.” (Against the Giants)
• “Kalarel is trying to summon something terrible from the Shadowfell!” “How do we stop him?” “Go to the Keep and… clear the dungeon.” (Keep on the Shadowfell)

There’s nothing terribly wrong with this formula, of course. As you can see, it can be easily mapped to any number of potential crises. It has the virtue of being easy to set-up (Bad Guys X are trying to do Bad Thing Y and they can be found at Bad Place Z). And the players generally know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing (“Wipe them out, all of them”).

However, it does have the rather unfortunate side-effect of inherently funneling everything through the combat system, drastically narrowing the range of potential gameplay. And when you attempt to apply this default formula to the megadungeon it creates two major problems:

First, it’s a grind.  If your goal is to “wipe out all the bad guys” in a dungeon filled with bad guys, then the megadungeon boils down to a very simplistic dynamic: You go into the dungeon, empty as many rooms as possible, and then retreat. Then you go back and  you do it again. And again. And again. And again.

Second, the formula is inherently designed to use up material, whereas your goal with the megadungeon is recycle, reuse, and remix material. And the more you restock the dungeon while your players are trying to destock it, the more of a grind the whole thing becomes.

SETTING A DEFAULT

Having set aside the default mode of “clear the dungeon”, what are we to replace it with?

It’s not unusual at this juncture for someone to say, “Exploration.” Go poke around in the corners of the dungeon because you’re curious about what might be hanging out down there.

It’s not a bad suggestion, per se. But in my experience, exploration for the sake of exploration can be rather aimless. It lacks the necessary specificity to function as the driving force behind a campaign. I suspect this is because it doesn’t provide a strong enough criteria for decision-making: If you’re standing at an intersection in the dungeon and your goal is merely “to explore”, does it really matter which way you go? Not really. You’ll be exploring whichever way you go.

But “exploration” remains a compelling concept. Is there a way we can make it a more clearly defined goal?

Gold.

Here I once again find myself looking back to the earliest versions of the game, when the default method of play was not “kill the monsters”, but instead “find the treasure” — i.e., exploration geared towards a more specific end. And, notably, a specific end which — unlike “kill the monsters” — doesn’t pre-suppose the tactical and strategic means of success. (“Kill the monsters” implies blasting them with spells and poking them with pointy bits of metal. “Find the treasure” might mean killing monsters… but it could also mean sneaking past them, negotiating with them, distracting them, hiring them, tricking them, trading with them, or any number of other possibilities.)

TREASURE HUNTING

“Find the treasure”, in its most generic form, may not be terribly compelling. But it is sufficient for reliably getting the PCs to the entrance of the dungeon (and universal enough that it provides little meaningful constriction in terms of the types of characters that can be created; of course, there’s also no reason why a player couldn’t find a more unique goal for their PC).

Before one simply writes off “find the treasure” as bland pablum, however, consider that in its more specific forms “find the treasure” has served as the basis for some of the great stories of our time (or any time): Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Maltese Falcon, The Hobbit, The Illiad, The Golden Fleece. They’re all stories about treasure-hunting.

And OD&D builds a method for building towards that specificity right into its rules for procedural content generation: Treasure maps.

If you’re randomly generating treasure troves using the OD&D guidelines, then most intelligent foes will have a 10-15% chance of having one or more treasure maps. These can, of course, take many forms. (The Judges Guild Book of Treasure Maps supplements included everything from journal entries to scribbled notes to careful exemplars of cartography.) But the point is that a treasure map points you towards some specific treasure: You are no longer just poking around for gold in the general sense; you are specifically seeking for “the Tombe of Aerthering who is called DAMNED” (to take one example).

SPECIFIC DUNGEON GOALS

Moving beyond that, the point of setting a default goal (like “find the treasure”) is not to limit the game, but rather to provide a baseline to ensure that gaming happens. The point isn’t to say “you will go treasure-hunting”, but rather to say “if you can’t think of anything better to do, we’ll default to treasure-hunting”.

More generally, once you’ve used your default goal(s) to get the PCs into the dungeon complex, more specific goals will generally tend to accumulate on their own. In my Caverns of Thracia game, for example, a deep grudge quickly settled in against the minotaur who kept cropping up on an irregular basis. (He had killed or maimed more than a dozen PCs, so the grudge is probably understandable.) There were cheers at the table when he was finally cornered and killed in a recent session.

Have we arrived back at “killing the bad guy” as a viable megadungeon goal? Sure. (You didn’t think I was advocating for combat to be taken out of D&D, did you?) It’s not necessary to completely abandon the “there are bad guys, go get ’em” formula. But it may require a little more subtlety than that mail-order course on strategy from Palpatine University might suggest. “Wipe them out, all of them” might cut it if they’re the only guys in the neighborhood, but picking a fight with every humanoid tribe in the region because you want to put the cultists on level 4 out of commission probably isn’t a great idea.

Which begins to move us in the general direction of a more general precept: While it is necessary to maintain some sense of mystery regarding the depths of the megadungeon (as drawing back that veil of ignorance is one of the rewards for playing in a properly compelling megadungeon), it’s also important to foreshadow those depths by revealing certain details. These details, in turn, become goals for the PCs to achieve.

(The methods by which this foreshadowing can occur are essentially limitless: For example, the PCs may know that Black Donagal fled into the depths because they saw him do it. They may learn about the minotaur court by questioning a prisoner. They may find a map indicating the location of the Hall of Golden Maidens (if only they could identify one of the landmarks on their map). And so forth, not to mention divinations and magical visions.)

At this point, we can successfully return to the idea of “exploration” as a meaningful goal. Because while “exploring for the sake of exploring” is unfocused, exploring because you want to find the Tunnel of Black Rainbows is more than specific enough.

But we don’t have to stop there: The features of a megadungeon are people, places, and things. And all of these features can be foreshadowed and, thus, become goals. And out of people, places, and things every story in the history of the world has been told.

The default gets them playing. But once they start playing, there’s no limit to the things they can find or the goals they can discover.