Recently I’ve been involved in several discussions regarding skills in D&D.

There’s an attitude I’ve never been able to understand when it comes to roleplaying games (or anything else for that matter): “I have too many options.”

For example, lots of people complain that there are “too many supplements” for their game. In fact, a lot of people are looking forward to 4th Edition precisely because it will strip away all of those supplements. Ignoring for the moment that 4th Edition will have supplements released for it several months before the game itself is actually available, these complaints and this glee simply leave me scratching my head.

If you don’t want them, don’t buy them.

It’s not like someone is coming round to your house, holding a gun to your head, and forcing you to buy a supplement. If you don’t want them, then don’t buy them. Nothing could be easier. Your “problem” can be solved by doing, literally, nothing at all.

On the other hand, if you need them or want them… well, there they are. And the more of them there are, the better it is (because that drastically increases the odds that whatever supplement you need at this particular moment in time will, in fact, exist).

I bring this up because I see the same complaint leveled at 3rd Edition’s skill system.

The sentiment is perhaps most eloquently put by Vinicus Zoio on WotC’s messageboards: “God, I hope they get rid of skill points!”

“GOD, I HOPE THEY GET RID OF SKILL POINTS!”

I really couldn’t disagree more.

The existing skill point system is the best of both worlds.

(1) If you want to quickly generate a character’s skills, select a number of class skills equal to # + Int modifier and give them skill ranks equal to 3 + your level, where # is based on your class. (Multiclass Characters: For each class, select a number of class skills equal to # + Int modifier and give them skill ranks equal to their class level. Add +3 skill ranks to the class skills selected for whatever class was taken at 3rd level.)

(2) If you want to customize your character’s skills, on the other hand, you have complete flexibility to do that.

The only thing I’d tweak is the rules for handling increases in Intelligence so that they retroactively grant you skill points (the same way that Con increases retroactively boost your hit points). You can argue the “realism” of this (I don’t have a problem with it), but it removes the only mechanical hiccup getting in the way of the fast-and-easy creation method of scenario #1.

The Star Wars Saga Edition method of doing things (which appears to also be the way that 4th Edition is going), on the other hand, is remarkably inferior: It gives you scenario #1… and only scenario #1.

And here’s the trick: It doesn’t make scenario #1 any faster or easier. So by adopting the SWSE method of doing things, you’re sacrificing flexibility and customization, and you’re gaining… absolutely nothing.

SKILLED vs. UNSKILLED

To be fair, there is another argument for adopting the SWSE system for handling skills: It eliminates the disparity between skilled and unskilled characters.

The argument goes something like this: A character who specializes in the Hide skill will eventually become so skilled at hiding that a person who hasn’t invested any skill points into Spot will never be able to spot them. (This happens when there is a 20-point difference between the Hide skill bonus and the Spot skill bonus — the 1d20 roll can no longer span that difference.)

SWSE solves this “problem” by turning every character into a renaissance man: Your trained skills are set to:

1d20 + 5 + character level + attribute modifier + miscellaneous modifiers

Your untrained skills are set to:

1d20 + character level + attribute modifier + miscellaneous modifiers

As you can see, this means that all characters become skilled in all things (with the exception of some trained-only skills). A 10th level characters is as a good at every single skill as a trained 1st level character.

This does eliminate the disparity between the skill bonuses of various characters… but it also means that every single character in SWSE is Doc Savage.

FIXING A FALSE PROBLEM

But the real problem with SWSE’s “fix” is that this disparity isn’t actually a problem.

This type of disparity is a problem when it comes to attack bonuses and saving throws, because those are target numbers which are fundamental to a wide array of common challenges in the game: If you’ve reached a point where the rogue will automatically succeed (barring a natural 1) on any saving throw the fighter has any chance of making, then it becomes increasingly difficult to design challenges for the group.

But skills, in general, don’t suffer from these problems. Any problems created by disparities between skilled and non-skilled characters can be simply addressed by:

(1) Rewriting the skill rules to remove a handful of truly problematic skill uses. (Diplomacy and Tumble, I’m looking at you.) These are areas that need to be addressed any way.

(2) Not worrying about it. If the wizard can cast improved invisibility, why are you fretting about the fact that the uber-specialized Hider finds it trivial to sneak past the unskilled Spotter? If the spellcaster can whip off a dominate person, why is it a problem that the relatively naive guy who has never spent a rank in Sense Motive is consistently getting the wool pulled over his eyes by the legendary Bluff specialist?

LACK OF FLEXIBILITY

But an unnecessary lack of flexibility increasingly seems to be the design methodology for 4th Edition. For example, Andy Collins recently discussed the fact that, in 4th Edition, abilities which were once feats and available to any character will now be class-specific abilities. This is one giant leap backwards for the game.

Similarly, it now appears that monsters and PCs will be built on mutually incompatible frameworks.

All of these things are major strikes against 4th Edition, in my opinion. Combined with decisions like removing saving throws from the game (fundamentally altering something that has been a core component of D&D gameplay for more than three decades), focusing the game exclusively on miniature-based tactical play (both in terms of removing real-world measurements from the rules and in terms of designing monsters so that they have no function outside of combat), and changes to the meta-setting of the game (something roughly akin to changing the property names in Monopoly) the prospects for 4th Edition looker bleaker and bleaker for me.

It seems increasingly likely that the game is heading in the wrong direction. I’m still holding out some hope, but my suspicions are growing that I will not be making the transition from 3rd Edition to 4th Edition.

Sorry for the long break between updates. I was going to get some stuff posted last week, but then the news about the 4th Edition of D&D hit and put me into something of a scramble. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times previously, Dream Machine Productions is getting ready to launch its third line of products with Rule Supplement 1: Mounted Combat. With the eminent release of 4th Edition only eight months away, however, the implementation of this product line becomes murkier: How much commercial interest is there really going to be in rule supplements to a game system that’s going to be defunct in less than a year?

So I’ve spent the last week considering my options, rearranging our productions schedule, and intermittently panicking. The final result of all this is that Dream Machine Productions will release the rule supplements on which meaningful design work has already taken place. This will definitely include:

Rule Supplement 1: Mounted Combat
Rule Supplement 2: Flight
Rule Supplement 3: Vehicles

It may also include Rule Supplement 4: Advanced Skills and (even more tentatively) Rule Supplement 5: Advanced Training. This will depend on how the first three perform in terms of sales. In any case, the release schedule for all of these supplements will be accelerated, with the last volume being released no later than October or November.

This means that other products will be pushed back in the development and release schedule. But I don’t see that I have much choice: Either this material gets released fast to capitalize on the remaining market for 3rd Edition crunch material or I write off all the work I’ve already done on it.

For those with zero interest in the Rule Supplements, don’t worry: Our release schedule over the next couple of months will still include City Supplements and Adventure Supplements.

After 4th Edition has been released, it’s my current intention to update the existing City Supplements and Adventure Supplements to the new edition. At the very least, this will mean free conversion notes posted to the Dream Machine website. What will happen with the Rule Supplements will be an open question and will depend largely on what 4th Edition looks like.

THOUGHTS ON 4th EDITION

So what are my thoughts on 4th Edition? Thoroughly mixed.

For example, here’s a teaser video that Wizards of the Coast posted to YouTube. The only message I take away from that video is that WotC’s Research & Development is of the opinion that they’ve spent the last 30 years making the game so complex that nobody wants to use the grapple rules any more, and with 4th Edition they’re going to make the rules even MORE complex, but it’ll be okay because everyone will have a laptop to help them run and play the game.

On the other hand, in various press briefings and the like, WotC has said that they plan to make the game “easier to use” and that the Saga Edition of Star Wars is a “major preview” of what they’re planning for 4th Edition.

So which direction are they actually going?

Well, it’s important to understand that WotC has now established a lengthy track record of lying through its teeth when it comes to the release and content of new editions. Back in February of this year, for example, they claimed that they had no plans for a new edition of D&D and that the earliest we could conceivably see it would be 2009. Well, now it turns out that they — even as they were saying that — they’d already been in development for 4th Edition for more than a year. And, before that, there were the false claims that the 3.5 revision of the rules would not be incompatible with the 3.0 rules.

The lie about the nature of the 3.5 revision contributed significantly to the d20 collapse: Third party producers continued their development cycles and local retailers continued stocking their products in good faith that they would not be rendered obsolete with the release of 3.5, only to be sand-bagged when the actual rules came out and did precisely that. I, personally, built a business plan which took into consideration WotC’s February statement regarding the non-imminent release of 4th Edition (and I’m sure many other third-party publishers did the same).

My point with all this is that, frankly, I’m not really going to expect anything in particular until we actually see the books in May of next year. Anything that’s said before then may not, in fact, have any resemblance to what actually happens.

With that being said, I already have two reasons to be skeptical of 4th Edition.

First, there’s Bill Slavicsek. Bill Slavicsek is now the head of RPG R&D at WotC. In my opinion, Slavicsek has never displayed anything but mediocrity in his game designs: He’s responsible for the infamously bad 5th Edition of Paranoia and clumsy non-entity of Alternity. He not only screwed up the original D20 version of Star Wars, but was responsible — as a result — for setting a very unfortunate precedent for how D20 games should be designed. He negated the primary benefit of using the same rule system (familiarity with the rules) by filling his design with a plethora of minor changes which didn’t accomplish much of anything except being different.

Slavicsek, to his credit, does try to pioneer innovative game mechanics. Take Torg, for example. But the result is often clumsy and in need of refinement, and I suspect this is because Slavicsek is not particularly good at figuring out what the actual consequences of a given mechanic are when he designs it. For example, he championed the VP/WP system. The VP/WP system not only increases bookkeeping and rule complexity to achieve a mediocre result, but the result it achieves (increased lethality) is actually exactly the opposite of what Slavicsek and his design team claimed that it achieved (cinematic battles).

So, I don’t have high expectations from any game that Slavicsek is responsible for.

On the other hand, Mike Mearls is the head developer for 4th Edition. Mearls is responsible for a slew of high quality D20 supplements and the generally excellent Iron Heroes.

Unfortunately, since Mearls started working at WotC, there are plenty of indications that he’s swallowed the Kool-Aid. Which leads to the other big strike 4th Edition has against it, in my opinion…

DESIGN ETHOS AT WIZARDS

The current design ethos which seems to be holding sway at WotC is radically out-of-step with my own tastes in game design and gameplay.

Take, for example, an article Mearls wrote on the rust monster as part of the “Design & Development” column at WotC’s website. Here we have a rust monster given an ability which corrodes, warps, and cracks metallic equipment and weapons. 10 minutes later, though, the metallic equipment and weapons are A-OK. They just repair themselves without any explanation.

This design is an example of the “per encounter” and “no long-term consequences, because long-term consequences aren’t fun” schools of thought which the WotC design department seem to be mired in at the moment. But the result is a cartoony game system: My characters no longer live in a world I can believe in. They live in a cartoony reality where actions don’t have long-term consequences and the grid-lines of the holodeck are clearly visible.

Another example from Mearls would be his blog post about skills from late last year, to which I have already written a response. I’m not saying that this skill system is one we’re likely to see in 4th Edition, but I am saying that it shows that Mearls’ design sense has radically altered since he designed Iron Heroes and The Book of Iron Might.

Let’s take a look at a recent quote from David Noonan: “Powers unique to the new monster are often better than spell-like abilities. At first glance, this principle seems counterintuitive. Isn’t it easier and more elegant to give a monster a tried-and-true power from the Player’s Handbook? On the surface, sure. But watch how it works at the table. The DM sees the spell-like entry, grabs a Player’s Handbook, flips through it to find the relevant spell, reads the relevant spell, decides whether to use it, then resumes the action. See where I’m going with this? That’s a far more cumbersome process than reading a specific monster ability that’s already in the stat block. Heck, the physical placement of one more open rulebook is a hassle for a lot of DMs.”

This quote is interesting to me, because it shows the type of wrong-headed logic skew that I see prevalent in a lot of the WotC design decisions of late. Basically the thought process here goes something like this:

STEP 1: A spell-like ability looks easy to use, since it’s a tried-and-true power from the PHB. But, in practice, the DM actually has to open up the PHB to see how the spell works. So instead of having all the information at their fingertips, they have to open up another book. And if the creature has multiple spell-like abilities, you’ve actually got to look at multiple page references in the PHB to figure out what the creature’s range of abilities is.

So far, so good. This is all absolutely true.

STEP 2: It would be easier if we put all the relevant information in the monster’s stat block, so that it’s right at the DM’s fingertips.

Right again. Some people might complain about “wasted space”, but I would love the utility of it. I have a similar reaction whenever I see “undead traits” in the stat block. You mean I have to flip back-and-forth through my copy of the MM to keep on top of this creature? It took me many months of DMing 3rd Edition before my undead stopped losing random abilities from that “undead traits” entry.

STEP 3: So they shouldn’t have spell-like abilities. Every creature should have a completely unique mechanic designed just for it.

… what the hell? How did you go skewing suddenly off to the side like that?

The problem is that Noonan is fallaciously conflating two types of utility:

(1) Spell-like abilities make it easier to use the rules because, as your familiarity with the rules for various spells grow, you will gain greater and greater mastery over a larger and larger swath of the ruleset.

(2) Putting all the information you need to run a creature in the creature’s stat block makes it easier to use the creature because all the information you need is immediately accessible (without needing to look in multiple places, which also ties up books you may need to be using to reference other information).

There’s no need to jettison utility #1 in order to achieve utility #2. The correct solution is to use spell-like abilities and list the information you need regarding the spell-like ability in the creature’s stat block.

(Which is not to say that a creature should never have a unique ability. There is no spell to model a hydra’s many-heads, for example. The point here isn’t to stifle creativity. The point is to avoid reinventing the wheel every time you want to build a car.)

We actually saw a similar logic-skew in Mearls’ treatment of the rust monster:

STEP 1: Rust monsters feature a save-or-die attack (and often you don’t even get a save). The only difference is that it targets equipment instead of characters. Save-or-die effects aren’t fun, because they simplify the tactical complexity of the game down to a crap shoot.

This is absolutely correct.

STEP 2: The rust monster should be able to attack, corrode, and destroy equipment (because that’s its schtick and it’s a memorable one) but it shouldn’t be a save-or-die effect.

Yup.

STEP 3: So we should keep the save-or-die attack, but make the armor miraculously un-rust and de-corrode after 10 minutes.

… and there they go again, skewing off towards the cliff’s edge.

(The correct answer here, by the way, is: “The rust monster will use the existing mechanics for attacking items. Because we want the rust monster’s ability to be frightening and unusual, we will allow it to bypass hardness. The damage will also be inflicted on metallic items used to attack the rust monster. Magic items are affected, but may make a saving throw to avoid the damage.”)

Let’s take another quote form Noonan: “Our underlying reason was pretty simple: We wanted our presentation of monsters to reflect how they’re actually used in D&D gameplay. A typical monster has a lifespan of five rounds. That means it basically does five things, ever, period, the end. (Forgive me if that seems like a totally obvious insight.) Too often, we designers want to give our intelligent, high-level monsters a bunch of spell-like abilities—if not a bunch of actual spellcaster levels. Giving a monster detect thoughts or telekinesis, for example, makes us feel like those monsters are magically in the minds of their minions and are making objects float across the room all the time. But they aren’t! Until the moment they interact with the PCs, they’re in a state of stasis. And five rounds later, they’re done.”

This is yet another logic skew at work. They correctly identified a problem (“when combat and non-combat abilities are mixed together in the stat block, it’s difficult to quickly find the combat abilities on-the-fly”) and simultaneously came up with two solutions:

1. We will have a new stat block that separates the combat information from the non-combat information. This will make it much easier to use the stat block during combat, and if it adds a little extra time outside of combat (when time pressure isn’t so severe) that’s OK. (You can see the logic behind this solution discussed, quite correctly, by James Wyatt in another column.)

2. We will get rid of all the non-combat abilities a monster has, since they’ll never have a chance to use them given their expected lifespan of 5 rounds.

Now, ignoring all the obvious problems in the second design philosophy, why do you even need to implement such a “solution” when you’ve already got solution #1 in place?

(In case the design problems in the second “solution” aren’t obvious, here’s another quote from David Noonan: “Unless the shaedling queen is sitting on a pile of eggs, it doesn’t matter how the shaedlings reproduce. The players will never ask, and the characters will never need to know.” What Noonan is ignoring there is that the reason the PCs might be encountering the shaedling queen in the first place is the pile of eggs.

If D&D were simply a skirmish game, Noonan would be right: You’d set up your miniatures and fight. And the reasons behind the fight would never become important. But D&D isn’t a skirmish game — it’s a roleplaying game. And it’s often the abilities that a creature has outside of combat which create the scenario. And not just the scenario which leads to combat with that particular creature, but scenarios which can lead to many different and interesting combats. Noonan, for example, dismisses the importance of detect thoughts allowing a demon to magically penetrate the minds of its minions. But it’s that very ability which may explain why the demon has all of these minions for the PCs to fight; which explains why the demon is able to blackmail the city councillor that the PCs are trying to help; and which allows the demon to turn the PCs’ closest friend into a traitor.

And, even more broadly, the assumption that detect thoughts will never be used when the PCs are around assumes that the PCs will never do anything with an NPC except try to hack their heads off.

One is forced to wonder how much the design team is playing D&D and how much the design team is playing the D&D Miniatures game.)

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

All of this is not to say that I’m rejecting 4th Edition out of hand. There are certainly lots of interesting things coming out of the WotC design shop at the moment, too. And, like I say, there’s really no way to tell what 4th Edition will actually be like until we actually have it in our hands.

For example, I was really excited to read about racial levels — at every level you would gain not only class abilities, but racial abilties (making your choice of race more flavorful and meaningful). That sounds like a really nifty mechanic. Of course, later in that same essay they explain that they’ve backed a way off on that idea.

One of the things I would love to see fixed in 4th Edition is the amount of prep time for the DM. But it’s fairly clear that this is not going to actually be addressed in a direct fashion. For example, look at what they’re planning for classes: A multitude of decision points. This is great for the player, but it makes it ever more difficult to stat up NPCs quickly and on-the-fly for the DM.

People complained about having to spend skill points, but that’s always been easy to kludge: Pick a number of class skills equal to your class skill points per level + your Intelligence bonus and max out the ranks. I don’t see any way to kludge this type of level-by-level decision tree, however. You’re going to have to actually go through and make those decisions every time you stat up an NPC.

I suspect that everything WotC has to say about “easier to prep” and “easier to use” really means “look at the nifty online tools you have to pay a monthly subscription for”. Is that cynical? Maybe. And there seems to be a good chance these online tools won’t require the same subscription fee as D&D Insider access will. But, even then, this just brings me back around to my original point:

A game so complex I need to bring my laptop along to prep it and run it?

That doesn’t sound appealing to me at all.