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

(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.

Go to Part 1

BALANCE: I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how 4th Edition is “less broken” or “more balanced” than 3rd Edition. Personally, I doubt it. When you look at the poor statistical analysis being applied to problems like the 15-minute advenuturing day and skill challenges, I see no reason to assume that the system is particularly robust. I mean, if the designers couldn’t be bothered to calculate the most basic probabilities of their core mechanics, why would I assume they spent any time balancing the complex interactions between different powers and abilities?

On top of that, 4th Edition is so fundamentally different from previous editions of rhe game that the legacy of balance instilled into the system by 30+ years of playtesting no longer exists. Meanwhile, the playtesting for 4th Edition was significantly reduced in scope from the rigorous playtesting that 3rd Edition was subjected to.

So we have a game with (a) less playtesting and (b) demonstrated sloppiness in the design of its most basic elements. And you’re telling me it’s “more balanced” just because the designers told you that they “fixed the math”? C’mon. Within mere days of the game being released, the designers had already publicly admitted that they’d actually screwed up the math instead of fixing it.

It’s true that, as I write this just a few short weeks after the game was released, the character optimization boards have not yet ripped Pun-Pun size holes in the game. But it’s not like Pun-Pun cropped up in September 2000, either. (It took four years, a revision of the core rulebooks, and multiple supplements.)

EASE OF PREP:  I’ve also heard a lot of people talking about how easy it is for DMs to prep adventures in 4th Edition. This is one of those areas where I’m fully willing to admit that my experience may be extremely different from that of other people playing the game, but frankly I can’t figure out what they’re talking about. Particularly since they seem to be primarily talking about the ease of prepping stat blocks.

For one thing, prepping stat blocks has never taken up more than about 5% of my time when prepping an adventure. It’s such a minuscule portion of the process that any time savings in that area is almost beyond irrelevant.

For another thing, with the exception of wizards (who had the extra hassle of trying to prep spellbooks), the amount of time spent prepping NPCs in 4th Edition has actually increased compared to 3rd Edition.Why? Because the number of decision points (due to powers) has increased for every single non-caster class (and has remained largely unchanged for the caster classes).

Nor is it any easier to create entirely new monsters or tweak existing monster stat blocks in 4th Edition.

However, one thing I do like in 4th Edition is the multitude of stat blocks in the Monster Manual. It really is a huge time saver to have a half dozen different stat blocks for orcs that I can immediately plug ‘n play into an adventure, instead of having to build every orc by hand from the basic stat block for the race. It’s a design choice that I liked in the later 3rd Edition Monster Manuals and it’s just as valuable here.

Unfortunately, the Monster Manual as a whole is probably one of the worst ever published for the game. Descriptive text has been pared down to a bare minimum… and often less than a bare minimum. It would be tempting to blame this lack of descriptive text on the multiple stat blocks, but that’s just not the case: Monster Manual V for 3rd Edition, for example, featured multiple stat blocks without gutting the descriptive text.

One example of this would be the guulvorg. First appearing in Monster Manual V, guulvorgs were recently created by goblin transmuters experimenting upon worg stock. Huge creatures with a tail of bulbous bone and blood which literally boils in their veins (and scorches those who wound them), the guulvorgs were given enough detail that they stood out as a unique variant of the standard worg.

In 4th Edition, on the other hand, guulvorgs “are often encountered in pairs (a male and a female). They are capable of bearing Large riders into battle.”

That’s the entirety of the creature’s description in the Monster Manual. And this is a pattern which is repeated over and over again throughout the book. If you already know what these monsters are, then the book has a high utility. If you aren’t already familiar with older editions of the game, however, the book is nothing more than a collection of extremely bland stat blocks.

This contributes heavily to the feeling that 4th Edition is nothing more than a tactical miniatures game.

And the dissociated mechanics in the Monster Manual are just actively painful to read. I think my “favorite” of the moment is the cyclops who has better depth perception because he only has one eye.

… I wish to God I was making that up:

EVIL EYE (minor; at will)
Range sight; the cyclops impaler gains a +2 bonus to ranged attacks made against the target. It can designate only one target with its evil eye at a time.

The Evil Eye is also an example of another 4th Edition design principle that I just can’t wrap my head around: Racial traits that aren’t.

In the case of the cyclops, every single cyclops stat block has an Evil Eye ability listed… but they’re all different. One grants a free basic melee attack; another grants a bonus to ranged attacks; another lets the cyclops shift 2 squares instead of 1; another applies a penalty to a target’s speed; and so forth. There’s no common thread to these abilities except that they’re all called “Evil Eye”.

Continued…

Go to Part 1

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…)