The description of the original helm of teleportation from OD&D recently struck me as particularly interesting:

Helm of Teleportation: The Magic-User employing this helm must have a Teleportation spell in order to take advantage of the device. Having but one such spell the Magic-User can Teleport himself endlessly about the universe, but if he teleports some other person or object the helm does not function and the spell proper is used. Thus the helm is good only to transport the Magic-User himself. Treat as a non-protective helm if worn into combat.

(A passage which also indicates that “protective helms” should have some beneficial effect in combat, but if there’s any explanation for what the benefit would be the rules are rather silent on the matter. I’ve been thinking about applying a -1 AC penalty for missing helmets. But I digress.)

What I was particularly struck by in this passage was the similarity between its mechanical construction and the construction of reserve feats from Complete Mage for 3rd Edition. Conceptually I always liked the idea of reserve feats (allowing spellcasters to make minor magic-based contributions on a regular basis), but found the actual execution to be rather broken. (Allowing wizards to do 6d6 points of area effect damage per round with no saving throw, for example, no longer qualifies as a minor contribution.)

But it might be interesting to take properly balanced reserve-type abilities and have them accessible via magical equipment (like the original helm of teleportation). I’m particularly drawn to the image of magic wands that don’t have charges, but instead allow you to use specific spells you currently have memorized in a powered-down form.

On the other hand, maybe chewing up an equipment slot would be necessary to keep this sort of thing balanced. Or what if there was a percentage chance that you’d lose your reserve spell whenever you triggered the reserve item? In a semi-similar fashion, AD&D’s helm of teleportation limited the number of uses per day based on the number of teleport spells you had prepared. (So that the item extends your magical endurance, but not necessarily limitlessly so.)

The casting of magical rituals was once a lengthy and time-consuming process; one which often required the combined efforts of entire covens or wizard circles to complete. All of that changed, however, when wizards first discovered spells.

The earliest spells were dangerous and unstable — parasitic horrors from a primordial proto-plane of raw magical essence which feasted memetically upon the sanity of those they infected. But whether by accident or design, a small band of wizards managed to tame the spells to their own purposes. With proper training, they learned that these living parasites could hold complex rituals in a state of pressurized memetic potential. And then, by infecting themselves, they discovered that they could release the entrapped rituals upon command.

Magical rites that had once taken hours, days, or even months to cast could now be unleashed in minutes. (And later, as their arts improved, in mere moments.) The world was transformed.

The parasites, of course, were consumed in their casting. And so, every morning, wizards find themselves preparing fresh spells and then infecting their minds with them. It takes years of practice to perfect the finely honed balance required to sustain even a single spell-parasite in your mind without being driven mad by its thought-consuming proclivity. The ability to sustain multiple spells in that state of mind-rending follows more quickly, but it is always a delicate balance between power and madness for those who would follow such a path.

Generations passed before the spell parasites mutated again: Those possessed of rich, magical bloodlines began to be born infested with the parasites. Women died in horrific, unspeakable childbirths… the nature and fate of their spawn better left unspoken. Fears of plague and mass extinction followed.

But then a state of symbiosis was once again found with the new form of the parasites: Some children were born infested with parasites, but appeared otherwise normal. Some felt that the parasites had mutated into a more benign form. Others whispered worries, hurled epithets, and named them plaguebearers.

Time, however, would eventually name them sorcerers: Unlike their wizardly brethren who were forced to carefully prepare each spell before infecting themselves with it, the roiling mass of parasitic entities running rampant through their bloodstreams allowed these sorcerers to unleash extemporaneous magical assaults. Some found that they could literally “burn out” their infections by simply expending their parasites in overwhelming magical onslaughts. (Unfortunately, not all of these outbursts were controlled ones.) But other sorcerers discovered that as long as they were careful not to burn out all of the potential of the parasites they hosted, a symbiosis of sorts could be maintained as the parasites regained their strength each day.

Some name the world a better place for the perfection of these magical arts. Others still watch the plaguebearers warily, worried that some greater horror may emerge from the thought-eating worms which roam unchecked through the minds of all magicians.

And then there are others who whisper that spells may be but a lesser order of beings from that distant proto-plane of magic. If so, what greater terrors might be unleashed from such a place?

While bantering with Zak at Playing D&D With Porn Stars (NSFW; EDIT: Zak turned out to be a missing stair and then a very well known serial abuser years after this was posted), I came up with a quick-and-dirty system for handling 3rd Edition NPCs:

(1) Give them an arbitrary number of HD. (Let’s say in d8s.)

(2) Assign them an array of ability scores.

(3) Figure out their AC. (Assign a number or do armor + Dex.)

(4) Figure out how much damage their attacks do. (Assign a number or do weapon + Strength.)

(5) Done.

In play, pertinent stats can be easily calculated off HD:

Melee Attack: HD + Strength modifier
Ranged Attack: HD + Dexterity modifier
Saving Throws: 1/2 HD + ability modifier
Skills: HD + ability mod

You could also, obviously, precalculate these values if you were feeling fancy. But where this is really useful is when you’re trying to keep up with your PCs on-the-fly. If you can quickly jot down:

HD 7; Str 16, Dex 12, Con 14, Int 11, Wis 10, Cha 8; plate, longsword

Then you’ve got enough information to run the NPC.

If you want to class up the joint a little bit, it’s pretty easy to slap a few class abilities on there. And here’s how you do spellcasters:

(1) Look up how many spell slots they have.

(2) Write those numbers down.

(3) Open your PHB to the spell lists and pick spells as they cast ’em.

So you might jot down:

Wizard 8; Str 8, Dex 14, Con 10, Int 18, Wis 14, Cha 11; 4/4/3/3/2

And that’s enough to run the encounter.

It’s a pity that old school monsters didn’t include ability scores, because otherwise this system would allow you to instantly convert them on-the-fly.

OBSERVATION

The monster lists in the 1st Edition Monster Manual are basically 100 pages long (page 6 to page 103).

CONCLUSION

Gimme a d100. Let’s see what’s lurking in these 124 miles of wild mystery.

This is something I started touching on a couple of days ago, but I decided it would be better served if left to stand on its own.

In the ’90s, the RPG industry embraced the supplement treadmill. Led by TSR, White Wolf, AEG, Pinnacle, and a host of others, publishers discovered that they could monetize their game lines by turning out a constant stream of supplements. If you’re cynical you can describe this as “greed”. If you’re realistic, you’ll realize that a lot of great games got produced and supported which would otherwise not have existed in a shrinking marketplace.

What most of these publishers realized was that player-focused content sold better than GM-focused content. (The simplistic explanation is that there are more players than GMs.) And that gives us the era of the supplement treadmill driven by splatbooks and the class books.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

By 2000, however, there were clear signs that this supplement treadmill was a short-term solution that led to long-term burnout: Eventually you saturate your market (when your players have more options than they could play in a lifetime), and then the only solution is to burn it all down, revise your rulebooks, and start over again. After several cycles of this, for example, White Wolf eventually had to reboot the entire World of Darkness in an effort to restart their treadmill.

But, ultimately, this isn’t smart business: You’re needlessly tossing away thousands or millions of dollars in development costs every time you burn down your previous edition. And you’re risking alienating your customer base (or losing them altogether).

Right around this time, Ryan Dancey tried a radical new strategy for selling RPGs. The better known part of that strategy was the OGL, but let’s ignore that for now and focus on the other part of the strategy: Evergreen products. Dancey wanted WotC to get out of the supplement business and instead focus on the evergreen products — the products that produce significant sales for significant periods of time.

To cut a long story short, Dancey’s strategy failed: The first two evergreen products WotC launched (Psionics Handbook and Epic Level Handbook) were spectacularly poor in their design and landed with wet, dull thuds. So ’round about 2002, WotC discovered that their evergreen strategy wasn’t working and their B&W, softcover class supplements were being blown away in production value by third party developers.

So WotC did what every major RPG publisher had been doing for the last 15 years: They rebooted the rule system so that they could reboot their supplement lines. In 2003, 3.5 was released and it was followed by a line of full color, hardcover class supplements.

THE DILEMMA

Fast forward a few more years and WotC discovers that the market for 3.5 class supplements has become saturated: Their second (and third) passes through the core classes just aren’t selling as well as the first pass did. Cue the rules reboot.

And this is where WotC made several missteps which has badly fragmented their former market. I’m not going to dwell on that again, but I am going to make a couple of points here:

1. As long-tail economics and the digital era lead to creative material being available in perpetuity, the viability of rebooting your rule system every couple of years in order to reset your supplement market becomes increasingly problematic. The old stuff is still available. (Even if you pull all your PDFs off the market, the used market has become global. And, of course, there’s also piracy.)
2. WotC does not want to risk a repeat of 2008: I’m guessing they would like to do absolutely everything in their power to avoid a 5th Edition because it runs of the risk even further balkanizing their customer base.

I’ve seen many people describe WotC’s recent actions as “flailing”, but I don’t think that’s strictly true. I think they’re experimenting. They are trying to figure out if there’s any way to make D&D profitable in a long-term, sustainable fashion.

And that, IMO, is a good thing.

CHARTING NEW WATERS

Nor is WotC alone in this. There are a lot of publishers trying to chart a new course. Unfortunately, IMO, the solution a lot of those companies have found is settling down into a mindset of “produce little, coast on the marginal revenues from the long-tail of PDF”.

But there are other paths.

Paizo, for example, seems to be having success keeping their core system relatively contained while creating product churn through material which is inherently perishable: Not everyone needs adventure modules, but the people who do will want a new one when they finish the one they’re currently using.

Back at WotC you have the Essentials line as an effort to create a stable set of core products. You have boardgames tapping markets where long-term sales and stocking are more of the norm. You have Fortune Cards as a collectible (and as a way of monetizing organized play without, theoretically, seeming draconian).

Of course, you also have the DDI. Unfortunately, WotC’s execution of the DDI has also been infamously (and repeatedly) botched. The ideal would be charging a subscription fee for a set of useful evergreen tools (the most obvious of which would be the virtual table). In practice, however, it has been a digital subscription to the same burn-out content as the supplement treadmill (and may have arguably hastened the speed of that burn-out for 4th Edition). WotC’s decision to move the character builder online can be best understood as an effort to prevent saturated customers from saying “thanks, I’m good now”, canceling their subscriptions, and continuing to use the builder offline with the content they already purchased.

Personally, I suspect the most successful course would include returning to Dancey’s vision of evergreen products and studying what went wrong with those efforts. And I think a large part of that will be understanding that toolkits don’t sell unless people have projects that require those toolkits: It’s not enough, for example, to provide rules for ship-to-ship combat or mass combat… You need to offer people a mode of gaming in which ship-to-ship combat or mass combat are integral to their games.

This will also begin to tie back into open game tables. But open game tables will also be important because monetizing your existing customers won’t be enough; we also need to figure out how to grow the RPG market again. And I think a large part of the problem has been that the viral speed of the RPG meme has been reduced to molasses by the modern paradigm of gaming. Most games appear to get sold because of actual play experiences: You buy Monopoly or Arkham Horror because you played it with somebody else and enjoyed it. If Monopoly or Arkham Horror had an expected play mode where you got together with the same group of 6 people for 6-18 months before starting a new game to which you might invite new people to join you, then Monopoly and Arkham Horror would not be as popular as they are. Notably, D&D exploded during a time period when this wasn’t the expected mode of play.