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4th Edition has gutted the non-combat portions of the game. It took me awhile to really come to grips with this because there is a large degree to which familiarity with previous editions causes you to simply glaze over what’s missing from the new edition. But once I realized what I was seeing, and really focused on the problem, it quickly became clear that the designers had decided that D&D was a game about combat, combat, and more combat.

NON-COMBAT SKILLS:  The skill system in 4th Edition has been “simplified”. Part of this means reducing the flexibility and freedom of choice to be found in 3rd Edition (while gaining no appreciable benefit from the loss), but the other part of it is the systematic removal of non-combat skills and non-combat skill uses.

When I have brought this up in discussion with diehard supporters of 4th Edition, I have often been told that I’m wrong: There are still some non-combat skills and skill uses left in the game.

This is true. But if you cut off both my legs and one of my arms, the fact that you left me with one working hand doesn’t mean that you haven’t mutilated me.

Appraise, Craft, Decipher Script, Handle Animal, several Knowledge skills, Perform, Profession, Ride, and Use Rope are all completely gone. Disguise and Forgery have been dumped into the Bluff skill, but have no associated skill uses. (This is the entirety of their description in 4th Edition: “You make a Bluff check to […] pass off a disguise or fake documentation…”)

And when you look at the skills which do remain, non-combat uses for those skills have also been widely removed from the game. (On the other hand, several new combat uses for skills have been added — so it’s not that they were just paring the whole list down.)

In play, this wasn’t just hypothetically problematical. Twice in our very first session of 4th Edition the players ran straight into the wall of missing non-combat skills. And, of course, I was left improvising house rules on the fly to cover over the gaping holes left in the rules.

I don’t expect any rule system to be encyclopedic, but the advantage 3rd Edition had was a comprehensive structure of skills that made improvising non-detailed tasks really simple. In years of playing 3rd Edition, I can’t remember a single time I ran into a situation where I could say, “There’s no skill for that.” Which meant that my task in 3rd Edition was simply figuring out the appropriate DC to use. In mere hours of playing 4th Edition we ran into “there’s no skill for that” multiple times, necessitating the creation of entire mechanics. (The sheer number of mandatory minor house rules you have to track in order to run 4th Edition in a consistent fashion is truly mind-boggling to me.)

What leaves me scratching my head over this design decision is that, with the new method of handling skills at character creation, it was so totally unnecessary. The only legitimate complaint against having lots of skills in 3rd Edition is that some PC classes arguably don’t have enough skill points to take a significant selection of those skills. However, in 4th Edition that concern has been completely negated. So why not invest the 2 or 3 pages of text it would have taken to provide the same level of comprehensive support for non-combat skill use in 4th Edition that you had in 3rd Edition?

NON-COMBAT EQUIPMENT: I’ve talked about this before, but all non-adventuring equipment and most of the non-combat adventuring equipment has gone M.I.A. in 4th Edition. This includes staples of the dungeon crawling genre like 10-foot poles, chalk dust, and the like.

NON-COMBAT POWERS: Finally, when you compare the spells and class abilities in 3rd Edition to the powers and rituals available in 4th Edition the new game’s wholesale embrace of combat and systematic rejection of non-combat play becomes pretty obvious. And this, naturally, spills over into the magic items available in the game, as well.

As with skills, it’s not as if there aren’t any non-combat powers in 4th Edition. It’s just that the number of non-combat options have been drastically reduced, while the number of combat options has been increased.

COMBAT, COMBAT, COMBAT: Of course, it’s not as if D&D has ever been a combat-lite game. But 4th Edition puts its hand firmly on the combat side of the scale and pushes down hard. Frankly, the game hasn’t been this myopic in its combat-focus since the original 1974 boxed set… and that was when the game was little more than an expansion pack for the Chainmail tactical miniatures game.

The simple reality here is that D&D miniatures are, by all accounts, more profitable for WotC than D&D books are. It’s little wonder, I suppose, that we have been given rules that look like a tactical miniatures game and adventures which are explicitly designed as a series of tactical combat encounters complete with set-up instructions for the miniatures.

Personally, I have little interest in the direction this has taken the game. Tactical miniatures combat is not the primary reason I play roleplaying games. And, honestly, I feel that WotC has made a wider strategic mistake. They have stated that one of their design goals with 4th Edition was to appeal to a new generation of gamers and that, to win the attention of that generation, they would need to compete against video games like World of Warcraft and Diablo.

But the people who play D&D for the excitement of hack ‘n slash combat are the players you are least likely to retain in a head-to-head matchup with computer and video games. You can get the same basic style of combat in Diablo, after all. But you get it faster, with prettier graphics, and without having to do the math. Plus, you can play any time you want to. You can even play with your friends (whether they live near you or not), and with a minimal effort (no larger than hauling a sizable miniature collection around) you can set up a LAN party and play with them in person.

Don’t get me wrong: I like having a robust and tactically interesting combat system in D&D. But I believe that, if you want your pen ‘n paper roleplaying games to compete with the video variety, then you shouldn’t be trying to compete with the greatest strengths of video games. D&D will never beat the Diablos of the world when it comes to combat simulation, graphics, or ease of play.

Where pen ‘n paper roleplaying games can separate themselves from the video variety is outside of combat. It is the truly open-ended nature of the game — the GM’s ability to respond to any scenario or action the players might propose — that video games are still decades away from emulating.

I was hoping that D&D would move towards those strengths, while still retaining all the benefits of its dungeon crawling roots (this really is a situation where you can have your cake and eat it, too). Instead, with 4th Edition, the game embraced its weaknesses.

Continued…

Catherine D. posted a very insightful comment in response to my playtesting essays that, indirectly, got me thinking again about the radically different experience I have with combat in 3rd Edition compared to some of the descriptions I hear from others online.

For example, I hear that 3rd Edition combat is static, with characters just standing around and beating on each other — but, at my gaming table, there’s lots of movement and maneuvering. Battles will frequently flow from one room into another.

Catherine also noted that, for her, combat tends to only last a few rounds. In my experience, there’s actually a great deal of variety depending on the style of encounter I’m using. (And this is a subject I may touch on in a later post.) But long battles — often lasting twenty or more rounds — are not unusual in my games.

Similarly, I’ll frequently hear people talking online about how long it takes to resolve a round of combat in 3rd Edition. This isn’t my experience, either. Certainly the longer combats (twenty rounds or more) will take a good chunk of time to play through, but the encounters that only last three or four rounds? Mere minutes of table time.

So, to give some sense of what combat is like in my campaigns, I’ve decided to post an excerpt from the journal for my current campaign. I selected this particular example in response to the following quote from Catherine’s comment:

If the fights all have to be about the same length, they are longer and more engaging. 3.5 said your actions in combat were role-playing, but 4.0 seems to actually mean it. Making fights last long enough to evolve and tell stories was mostly done by fiat and trickery in 3.5; in 4.0, in-combat character choices and battlefield evolution seem to be the default.

Because I have had exactly the opposite experience: In 4th Edition, due to the dissociated nature of the combat mechanics, roleplaying took a backseat to the mechanical manipulation of the game rules. In 3rd Edition, however, I will frequently have roleplaying-intense encounters like the one below.

So this is an example of a lengthy, roleplaying-intensive encounter. Tomorrow I might post an example of a highly mobile combat.

THE SETUP

While exploring a cyclopean subterranean complex, the party has stumbled into a large complex of caves inhabited by a clan of goblins. Having befriended the goblins, they discover that the clan is currently besieged by the “oozed ones” — goblins of the clan who have been infected by some sort of parasite which takes control of their brains and slowly turns them into ooze-like creatures.

With several goblin allies, including a goblin warrrior by the name of Itarek, they have journeyed deep into the “caverns of the ooze”…

(more…)

Go to Part 1

Note: This essay was written a little over a week and a half ago. Between the time I wrote it and today (as I post it), Wizards of the Coast has released errata for 4th Edition which corrects some (but not all) of the problems described below.

Since this essay still accurately describes my playtesting experience and serves as an apt critique of the rules as they were published, I have chosen not to rewrite it. However, I have added an Errata Addendum to the end of the essay discussing the changes that were made in the errata.

I’ve also talked about skill challenges before. Having completed my playtesting, here are my current thoughts on the matter:

(1) Skill challenges in their most general form are unusable as written because they’re so heavily dissociative. They are fundamentally disconnected from the game world (caring not about what the PCs have done, but merely how much they have done) and create strangely skewing probabilities, among other problems.

(2) Skill challenges in the specific form described in the 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide are unusable because they mandate railroading. If you follow the rules in the DMG you are supposed to (a) write a script for the PCs to follow; (b) tell them the script; and (c) if they try to deviate from the script, punish them for it with more difficult skill checks.

(3) Skill challenges are unusable because their probability is wacky. I’m not going to delve into the maths, but basically what it boils down to is that a 65% chance of success on a skill check is the watershed: If you have less than a 65% chance of succeeding at the skill checks making up a skill challenge, your chance of success on any skill challenge is very small and shrinks rapidly towards the essentially non-existent as you increase the complexity of the skill challenge.

If your chance of success is exactly 65%, then increasing the complexity of the skill challenge is virtually irrelevant (even though it’s supposed to be getting more difficult). And if your chance of success is larger than 65%, then skill challenges actually get easier as the complexity increases (when it’s supposed to be getting harder).

This is obviously not working properly. And, when you run the actual numbers of the system, you discover that the PCs generally have about a 10-20% chance of succeeding on a skill challenge designed for their level.

(Here’s a fix for the probability issues that looks pretty good to me as I glance over it. The author has also done some interesting things in terms of adding some depth to the gameplay of skill challenges. I haven’t fully delved into it, but it looks like it’s worth checking out. Note that, while this fixes the wacky probabilities of WotC’s skill challenges, it doesn’t address the emergent probability skewing which is an inherent characteristic of the dissociation arising from open skill challenges.)

(4) Even if you fix the probability, skill challenges are surprisingly boring in actual gameplay.

In the best case scenario, skill challenges simply duplicate the gameplay of previous editions: The players propose a course of action, the DM determines the skill and the DC, and then a check is made to determine success. In this scenario you’re tracking a bunch of extra numbers and suffering from the inherent dissociation of the system, but you’re not actually gaining any sort of reward for your effort.

In the worst case scenario, skill challenges turn one interesting die roll into six to ten monotonous die rolls. (And you’re still tracking the extra numbers and suffering from the inherent dissociation of the system.)

(5) The only potential benefit you gain from using the skill challenge system is that it gives you a structure for rewarding XP. But the wacky probabilities alone assures that this “system” is just as likely to erroneously give you a larger reward for an easier challenge.

Here’s another example of this “system” in action, from pg. 73 of the DMG: “If you use easy DCs, reduce the level of the challenge by one. If you use hard DCs, increase the levelof the challenge by two.”

When we look at the table for DCs by Level on pg. 42 of the DMG, we can quickly see that this is complete nonsense. For example, at 10th level the values are easy DC 17, moderate DC 21, hard DC 25. The guideline is claiming that if you take a 10th level challenge with moderate DCs and redesign it with easy DCs, you should end up with something equivalent to a 9th level challenge with moderate DCs. But you don’t. At 9th level, the moderate DC is 19, not 17. A 10th level challenge with easy DCs is, in fact, equivalent to a 6th level challenge.

Similarly, a 10th level challenge with hard DC 25 is not equivalent to a 12th level challenge with moderate DCs. It’s actually the equivalent of a 20th level skill challenge.

The “difference” between a 10th level skill challenge and a 12th level skill challenge actually reveals the complete absurdity of this “system”. That’s because there isn’t one. The DCs by Level table on pg. 42 of the DMG assigns the same values to every 3 levels. So levels 10-12 are all grouped together and have the same DCs for skill checks. Despite the fact that they’re identical in every way, a 10th level skill challenge with complexity 3 only rewards 1500 XP whereas a 12th level skill challenge with complexity 3 rewards 2100 XP.

This “system” is worse than useless. It’s literally just generating random noise and isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

(6) I still think there’s some real potential in the basic concept of social skill challenges. But the extant system isn’t even a stepping stone towards achieving that: You basically want to throw out everything the DMG has to say about skill challenges and start over from scratch.

(7) I also discovered some interesting uses for the basic concept of skill challenges in structuring cooperative disabling of dynamic traps. Once again, however, this requires you to scrap everything the DMG has to say about using traps and skill challenges before rebuilding the system from scratch.

What it really boils down in the final analysis is that complex skill checks are a useful mechanic. In other words, when you have a specific task defined by a concrete goal and a single method of success — such as disabling a trap, disarming a bomb, or playing a game of Chess — that is best modeled as a sequence of discrete actions, the basic formula of X successes before Y failures is a useful way of representing that mechanically. Even the S-curve probability distribution works well for these types of scenarios (it becomes a feature instead of a bug as skill trumps luck in larger and more complex tasks).

You can even get away with generalizing this to some extent: For example, you can use this structure to say that you can disable a magical trap by making Arcana checks, Thievery checks, or by dealing damage to the structure of the trap. By allowing these disparate checks to all feed into a single complex skill check, you facilitate cooperation in a way that’s far more dynamic and interesting than just using the Aid Another action.

But the skill challenge “system” as it’s presented in the DMG? Dissociative, broken, and useless. Don’t waste your time.

ERRATA ADDENDUM

In response to the general public outcry over the shoddy and unusable skill challenge mechanics published in the DMG, WotC responded in mid-July with errata aimed at correcting some of the more egregious problems with skill challenges. I’m going to take a few moments here to take a second look at the problems with the skill challenge mechanics and analyze how they were (or weren’t) corrected.

DISSOCIATION: Nothing was done to correct the heavily dissociated nature of the skill challenge system.

PROBLEMS WITH PROBABILITY: The errata corrected the most egregious and obvious of the probability problems with skill challenges. Notably, more complex skill challenges no longer become easier for people with higher skill modifiers. However, the probability of success still varies radically as you move away from the baseline values assumed at each level. This means that min-maxing is heavily rewarded. It also means that, rather than encouraging the participation of everyone at the gaming table (the purported design goal of skill challenges), the system instead rewards the group for figuring out whoever has the highest applicable skill modifier and then having that character roll all the checks.

(This means that skill challenges are yet another example of 4th Edition providing a “solution” to a “problem” which actually ends up making the problem worse rather than better. Brilliant.)

This probability pattern also means that tackling a skill challenge a couple levels higher than your current level is much more difficult than tackling a combat encounter a couple levels higher than your current level (and vice versa).

However, with all that being said, the emergent probability skews of the system (which result from the possibility of multiple paths of succcess and the dissociated nature of the mechanic) still remain.

EXPERIENCE AWARDS: They partially fixed their inability to perform simple arithmetic by removing the XP guidelines based on using Easy vs. Moderate vs. Hard DCs. Instead, you just vary the level of the challenge to make it easier or harder. However, this ignores the fact that there remains a significant difference between a skill challenge which features Easy DCs for a given level versus a skill challenge which features Hard DCs for a given level. (Nor are any solid guidelines given for the proporion of Easy vs. Moderate vs. Hard DCs you should be using.)

They also fixed the discrepancy where, for example, 10th level and 12th level skill challenges were statistically identical but had significantly different rewards by simply limiting skill challenges to the mid-point of each level range. (So, for you example, you can have 11th level skill challenges, but not 10th or 12th level skill challenges.)

RAILROADING: They have removed all of the rules requiring the DM to railroad their players. This is excellent news, and since I was (AFAIK) the first person to post these concerns online (both here and at WotC’s messageboards) I feel like I actively contributed to having these pernicious passages removed from the rules.

SLOPPY DESIGN: Skill challenges are essentially one of the core mechanics of 4th Edition. And they royally screwed them up. I’m glad to see that they’re issuing corrections in a timely fashion, but it doesn’t exactly instill a lot of confidence in me that they so fundamentally screwed up the most basic balancing of a core mechanic like this. What does their complete failure here say about any kind of complex interactions in the system?

CASCADING EFFECTS: Because skill challenges are a core mechanic, they’re used extensively throughout the system. For example, they’re a major element in the design of many traps. Despite this fact, the current errata doesn’t correct the design of these traps to match the revised skill challenge guidelines.

DESIGN DISCONNECTS: On June 14th, Mike Mearls stated: “The system went through several permutations as we worked on it, and I think there are some disconnects between the final text, our intentions, and how playtesters and internal designers use skill challenges.”

Clearly.

What I find interesting is the evidence of this disconnect that we have now seen strewn around the handful of books WotC has published for 4th Edition to date. For example, the skill challenges presented in H1: Keep on the Shadowfell don’t match the guidelines found in the DMG nor in the errata. And the skill challenges in H2: Thunderspire Labyrinth? They don’t match the DMG, the errata, or the skill challenges found in Keep on the Shadowfell.

That means that we have seen literally four different iterations of the skill challenge mechanics coming out of WotC.

This is, frankly, bizarre. And it speaks, again, to the fundamentally (and inexplicably) sloppy design of 4th Edition.

USABILITY: It should be noted that the errata itself is fairly unusable in its published form. I know it’s standard practice in WotC’s errata to simply include the relevant changes, but in this case the changes are of a nature which makes neither the rulebook nor the errata usable.

Notably, the revision of the skill challenge mechanics also included a revision of the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table on pg. 42 of the DMG. For those of you unfamiliar with 4th Edition, this table is the heart and soul of the system. I don’t think there’s been a table so crucial to the playing of D&D since the hit tables in AD&D1 were replaced with THAC0. And it’s been rendered unusable by the errata… which only replicates the three key columns which have been altered (without the other columns which give the information in those columns any relevance).

And since they didn’t get this problem fixed before they printed the Dungeon Master’s Screen for 4th Edition… well, that won’t fix your problem, either. You’ll need to recreate the table yourself by combining the information from the DMG and the errata.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

THE BOTTOM LINE: For me, the bottom line hasn’t changed much. Skill challenges are still dissociative, (slightly less) broken, and useless.

Continued…

Go to Part 1

Okay, I talked about dissociated mechanics before the 4th Edition rulebooks came out. I was concerned because these types of mechanics make it more difficult for me to do the things I generally enjoy doing in a roleplaying game — immersive roleplaying and world-building. In a worst-case scenario, dissociated mechanics actively impede any kind of roleplaying — when the game mechanics require you to make decisions as a player which have no analogy to the decisions of the character, the game has stopped being a roleplaying game and become something else. (Not necessarily something bad, just something else.)

In practice, I found 4th Edition to be as disappointing as I expected in this regard. The experienced players did, in fact, feel more distanced from their characters by the dissociated mechanics and ended up roleplaying less and focusing on the mechanics more.

The newbie players, on the other hand, roleplayed quite a bit. But this roleplaying was noticeably divided from the mechanical portion of the game — it was like improvising a story around a game of Chess or Life rather than using the improv structure of the roleplaying game.

This type of roleplaying is not unusual for new players. It doesn’t really matter what system you’re using: If they latch on strongly to the concept of roleplaying a character, new players will usually become very creative and think completely outside of the box.

What I discovered, however, was that the dissociated mechanics strewn throughout 4th Edition made it very difficult for me to respond to their creativity.

New players tend to sidestep the game mechanics and interface directly with the game world. When the mechanics are directly associated with the game world, this is easy to handle: You simply take what the new players are telling you, interpret it mechanically, and resolve it. But dissociated mechanics, by definition, create an interpretive barrier.

This problem actually comes from two directions: First, there’s the “you can’t do that” problem. This is what happens when something should be possible in the context of the game world but is impossible in the context of the mechanics. These types of conflicts are black marks on the game design, but are relatively easy to deal with in practice: You simply invoke Rule 0 and let the logic of the game world override the illogic of the game mechanics. Managing the huge number of effective house rules this requires eventually becomes a headache, but in the short term it’s not insurmountable.

The other aspect of this problem, however, is more insidious. 4th Edition is filled with dissociated tactical decision points. (For example, the fact that certain powers are more useful against minions than non-minions and vice versa.) These have no touchstone with the game world, which means that whenever somebody is trying to engage directly with the game world every single one of these decision points becomes a stumbling block. Dissociated mechanics, by their very nature, insist that you pay attention to them instead of your character’s world if you want to play the game.

Long story short: Dissociated mechanics are bad and 4th Edition is riddled with them.

Continued…

Go to Part 1

Speaking of “Death of the Wandering Monster”, the 15-minute adventuring day predictably reappeared in 4th Edition.

This was an interesting thing to observe because the design team for 4th Edition swore that they had done away with the 15-minute adventuring day. But the reality is that, rather than fixing the “problem”, they ended up making it worse.

As I describe in “Death of the Wandering Monster”, the 15-minute adventuring day is the result of a simple mechanical incentive: By design, the spellcasters are supposed to deal more damage less frequently and the fighters are supposed to deal less damage more frequently. Over the long-haul, this should balance out. But the 15-minute adventuring day — in which the spellcasters go into a single encounter, nova their most powerful abilities, rest, and then do it again the next day — destroys this balance. Not only does it result in the spellcasters consistently out-performing the fighters, it also leads to the entire party being far more effective against the opponents that they face.

Some people dislike the 15-minute adventuring day because it feels unnatural to them. But the reality is that it’s actually quite natural. In real life, people rarely fight intense battles and then turn around and immediately go looking for another one. When historical armies have been forced to fight a second battle immediately after the first one, for example, it has generally ended poorly for them. And you’ll basically never see a boxer fight a second match on the same day.

It makes perfect sense, all other things being equal, for characters in a life-and-death situation to use every single resource they have available to end up on the “living” side of that equation. And if that means they have to rest up and gather fresh resources before facing the next life-and-death situation, that makes sense, too.

And ultimately, as I say in “Death of the Wandering Monster”, this leads to the conclusion that the best way to solve this problem is to create a world or story where there is a reason for the characters to persevere. And that solution will work almost as well in 4th Edition as it did in 3rd Edition.

I say “almost as well” because, as I mentioned before, 4th Edition actually ended up making the problem of the 15-minute adventuring day worse. And it did that by making the incentive for doing it larger.

To understand what I mean, let’s talk about the other solution for the 15-minute adventuring day: Removing the mechanical impetus for resting. In order to do that, you have to do at least one of two things:

(1) Completely remove any mechanical benefit for taking a long rest.

(2) Provide a meaningful mechanical bonus for not taking a rest.

4th Edition’s designers apparently believed that they fixed the first problem by making sure that every class was given at-will and encounter abilities — things they could continue doing for as long as they wanted to without ever taking a long rest.

But the nova-rest-nova cycle of gameplay isn’t driven by a character’s least powerful abilities, it’s driven by their most powerful abilities — the things that are designed to be used rarely, but which the nova-rest-nova cycle allows to be used frequently.

In 4th Edition, a character’s most powerful abilities are their daily abiltiies. Which, as the name suggests, still benefit from the nova-rest-nova cycle and the 15-minute adventuring day. But just as all of the classes were given at-will and encounter powers, all of the classes in 4th Edition were given daily powers. Which means that you’ve gone from having one or two characters who could potentially benefit from the nova-rest-nova cycle to having ALL of the PCs potentially benefit from the cycle.

Okay, so what about the other potential mechanical solution — offering some sort of mechanical bonus for not taking a rest?

Virtually nonexistent.

You can accumulate X action points by going through 2X encounters per day, but this is irrelevant because you can only use 1 action point per encounter and you get 1 action point whenever you take a long rest.

You can also accumulate X daily uses of your magic items by going through 2X encounters per day. This is more useful because, unlike action points, you can use all of your accumulated daily uses for your magic items in a single encounter. But in order to gain that advantage you have to make sure you don’t use the daily use for your magic items in your first Y number of encounters in the day.

And that’s it. So, on the one hand, you have the ability to occasionally use more than one daily use of a magic item in a single encounter. On the other hand you have the ability to use all of your daily powers (including your daily use of a magic item) in every single encounter. It’s not hard to figure out which one represents the larger incentive.

Aggravating this problem even further, there’s the issue of healing surges. Characters have a certain number of healing surges per day, and virtually all healing in 4th Edition works by activating and using up these healing surges. Once you’ve used up your healing surges for the day, you basically can’t be healed any more and you have to rest.

In 3rd Edition, a group who wanted or needed to continue adventuring could invest in resources — like a wand of cure light wounds — that would allow them to do that. In 4th Edition, however, that same group will find itself literally incapable of pressing on.

Take, for example, my experienced gaming group. Because of the way our 3rd Edition campaign is structured, this group rarely experiences a short adventuring day. In fact, they’re usually scrambling to figure out some way to pack even more activity into every single day. This same group hit 4th Edition and, despite my efforts to jack up the sense of urgency in Keep on the Shadowfell, quickly fell into the 15-minute adventuring day. This was partly due to necessity (they were using up healing surges), but it was also largely because the pay-off for doing it was so much greater than it was in previous editions.

Continued…