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.

According to my e-mail inbox, this apparently needs to be said:

Yes, the new collectible Fortune Cards for 4th Edition are massively dissociated mechanics. But since this is already 4th Edition we’re talking about, I’m not sure that it really matters very much.

Poking around the web to see the full scope of this fuss, I have two additional reactions:

First, the cards are obviously going to create a power creep within the system. The effects on the cards are not even attempting to be balance-neutral, so the net effect of using the cards will be to essentially give everybody free one-shot magic items that can be used every session. I’m surprised to see anybody actually trying to dispute this; it’s like trying to dispute that water is wet. The only interesting point to consider here is that they just recently got done rebalancing the monsters because they decided they had been underpowered when they released the game. Did they rebalance with these cards in mind? Will they need to issue another sweeping errata to take the cards into account? Or will they simply live with the imbalance?

Second, it is absolutely true that WotC is trying to create an MtG-style market for D&D. Again, I’m not clear on how this could even be a matter for dispute: They are selling collectible cards.

Does this mean they’re trying to turn D&D into MtG? Almost certainly not. They’ve already got MtG.

But it does appear that WotC is trying to figure out how to make money from selling accessories for D&D. Or, to put it more accurately, how to get enough of their customer base to continue making regular purchases that aren’t part of the supplement treadmill that D&D can sustain a viable market without rebooting the rule system every 5 years.

And I think, on the balance, that’s a good thing. It’s something that WotC almost certainly needs to do: 2008 was a very bad year for them, and I suspect they’re trying to figure out how to avoid ever splitting their market like that again.

One potential mode of “old school” play is the idea that “everybody starts at 1st level”. Combined with each class having a separate experience chart table, individual experience awards, and open gaming tables it was pretty typical for adventuring parties to have a pretty wide variance in their levels. This, of course, isn’t “balanced“, so it’s come in for a good deal of scorn in the past couple of decades. Most groups today allow new characters to be rolled up using the party’s current level and keep everybody in lock-step through unified XP awards.

(My Ptolus group, however, has experienced a 1-3 level variance due to a variety of reasons. I have not found this be inherently traumatizing.)

Having played a megadungeon OD&D campaign for awhile now, however, I’ve found that there are a few mitigating factors in practice:

First, the open gaming table combined with super simple character creation results in everybody running a “stable” of characters. They can self-select whichever character is the best match for the current group or roll up an entirely new character depending on whatever is most appropriate.

Second, due to the lethality faced by 1st-level characters, players rolling up new characters want a couple higher level characters to accompany them. It greatly increases the odds of survival and the pace of advancement.

Third, it doesn’t actually take that long to “catch up”. For example, in the time it takes a 5th level fighter to reach 6th level, a 1st level fighter will reach 5th level. (And will catch up and become 6th level before the more experienced fighter reaches 7th.)

With all that being said, I’ve been giving some thought on how you can make the level gap more palatable.

In Eden Studio’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer roleplaying game, they compensate for the power difference between the Slayer and the Scooby Gang by giving the weaker characters additional drama points. Could this be adapted? Let’s say lower level characters get +1 inspiration points per difference in level? (So a 3rd level character adventuring with 6th level characters would get 3 inspiration points to spend per session.)

Inspiration points are a dissociated mechanic, obviously, but they could represent all sorts of things: It’s the guy who’s inspired to greater heights by Superman’s example. Or picks up a few tricks from sparring with D’Artagnan. Or gets an assist from Bruce Lee during the melee. But, basically, you’re rubbing shoulders with some elite dudes and some of it is wearing off.

Mechanically, we could simply use the existing action point mechanics for 3rd Edition. Alternatively we could continue taking our page from Buffy and allow for an inspiration point to be spent much more significantly:

• I Think I’m Okay: Restores half your lost hit points.
• Righteous Fury / Time to Shine: +5 to all actions for the current combat.
• Dramatic Editing: Actually alter the game world. (“Hey! There’s a secret door over here that leads us to the back of the goblin encampment!” “Good thing somebody dropped some holy water over here!”)
• Back From the Dead: Return from the grave through resurrection, a clone duplicate, a long-lost twin, or whatever else strikes their fancy.

Some of these look like they would exceed my “tolerance threshold” for D&D. Others wouldn’t. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

In “Revisiting Encounter Design“, I make the argument that 3rd Edition plays better if you use old school encounter design. To briefly sum up:

1. Design most encounters around an EL 2 to 4 lower than the party’s level.
2. Feel free to use large mobs (10+ creatures) with an EL equal to the party’s level.
3. Sparingly use encounters with an EL equal to the party’s level.
4. Occasionally throw in an EL+2 or EL+4 encounter.

Using this encounter design results in faster combats (which means you accomplish more in a typical game session) and drastically reduces the likelihood of the 15 minute adventuring day.

This advice is not radically different from that provided in the 3.5 DMG, which suggests that encounters should be 30% with ELs lower than the party’s level, 50% with ELs equal to the party’s level, 15% with ELs 1-4 higher than the party’s level, and 5% with ELs 5+ above the party’s level. (Let’s call this the 30/50/15/5 ratio for easy reference.)

THE ANALYSIS

This 30/50/15/5 ratio was not atypical in early 3rd Edition modules. For example, here’s the EL breakdown of combat encounters in the first section of The Forge of Fury (designed for a group of 3rd to 5th level characters):

EL 1
EL 2 (x7)
EL 3 (x3)
EL 4 (x4)
EL 5 (x4)
EL 10

If we use an average party level of 4th, this ratio breaks down to: 55/20/20/5. Not an exact match, obviously, but definitely within the ballpark of having 80% of your encounters equal to your lower than the party’s level.

But as you look at modules published in the last 5-6 years, the misguided “common wisdom” of how to design encounters for 3rd Edition had taken hold. For example, here’s the encounter breakdown from part four of Paizo’s Curse of the Crimson Throne (designed for 10th level characters):

EL 8
EL 10
EL 11 (x2)
EL 12 (x2)
EL 13
EL 14 (x3)

That’s a ratio of 10/10/80/0. 80% of the encounters are now above the party’s average level instead of below it.

You can see the same design principles in Wizard’s modules. For example, here’s Fane of the Drow (designed for 4th level characters):

EL 3
EL 4 (x4)
EL 5 (x5)
EL 6 (x5)
EL 7 (x2)

Which is roughly 5/25/70/0.

Similarly, here’s the breakdown from “The Demon Council”, the last section of Expedition to the Demonweb Pits (for 11th level characters):

EL 10 (x2)
EL 11 (x3)
EL 12 (x10)
EL 13 (x4)
EL 14 (x2)

Which gives us a ratio of 10/15/75/0. (This one looks a little better if you assume that the PCs are supposed to level up to 12th halfway through this sequence.)

THE TIP

A couple weeks ago, as I looked over my recent usage of published 3rd Edition scenarios, I realized that I’ve been instinctively using modules published in the last 5-6 years when the PCs are 2-3 levels higher than the recommended level.

For example, when you apply this guideline to the modules used above you end up with:

• Curse of the Crimson Throne 4: 50/10/30/0
• Fane of the Drow: 60/30/10/0
• “The Demon Council”: 70/20/10

Which definitely slants them back into the ballpark of what we’re looking for.

Reflecting on this also taught me something new: The tips in “Revisiting Encounter Design” are designed to widen the dynamic range of your encounters. Shifting the recommended level for these published modules made me realize that we’re also widening the dynamic range of our adventure design.

Fane of the Drow, for example, isn’t unachievable for 4th level characters. But it is a tough slog. And if you use “tough slog” as your baseline for normalcy, then you have nowhere to go: If your 4th level characters face anything tougher than this, their odds of dying horribly begin to skyrocket. Which means that if your 4th level characters “skip ahead” or take an unexpected shortcut, they could easily run headlong into a deathtrap.

But if Fane of the Drow is, instead, your expected baseline for 5th or 6th level characters, suddenly you’ve got room to breathe.

And where would having room to breathe become particularly important? Node-Based Scenario Design.

Revising your approach to encounter design allows you to be more fluid and dynamic in how you run and combine your encounters; it also allows you be more fluid and dynamic in how you run and combine your scenarios.

Jeffrey challenged me to a barghest stat block using the “3rd Edition rules; 4th Edition format” style I talked about yesterday.

As I mentioned to Jeffrey in the comments, the first thing I needed to do was fix the barghest: Designing a monster so that you need to apply new HD to it in the middle of combat is just bad design. Oddly, the designers of 3rd Edition knew this, which is why they included a negative level template (-1 on all checks, -5 hit points, -1 effective level, lose your highest level spell and your highest level spell slot). It seems pretty obvious to me that the way to fix the barghest is to reverse this template (as shown in the stat block below).

Jeffrey also made the point that 3rd Edition’s “laundry-list” of spell-like abilities can be difficult to make work with a 4th Edition-style stat block. I believe the trick of that is to simplify the spell descriptions down to “essential information”. (On the rare occasions when you need more detailed information on the spell, that’s when you crack open the reference manual.)

What really made me interested in rising to the challenge, though, were some thoughts I had on how the 4th Edition-style stat block could be used for shapechangers. Traditionally, I’ve simply gotten in the habit of prepping multiple stat blocks for shapechangers (so that when they change shape, I can just swap stat blocks). But I had some thoughts on color-coding that might make it possible to run them from a single stat block: The colors on the stat block below are coded to conditions described in the monster’s ability. (In this case, coded to different shapes.) The monster can only use colored abilities when the code is in effect (e.g., that shape has been assumed). Black text can always be used.

There are some formatting errors below, but the process I used to build these stat blocks is time-consuming to correct. (So I apologize for being too lazy to fix them.) I have concluded, in retrospect, that supernatural and spell-like abilities should be coded to icons to further clean-up the lay-out, but that hasn’t been executed.

UPDATE: And since I’ve got too much time on my hands, here’s a balor:

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