Wandering Monsters: Wandering Monster-ception

Rather than talk about monsters, this week’s Wandering Monsters column talks about the qualities of a good encounter, the purpose of random encounters, and asks how—or even if—you use either in your games.

The article states that a great encounter has history, a clear objective, and a meaningful outcome. I guess I can agree with these standards; I do not think that every great encounter has to have all of them, but it probably does not hurt. I would add that a great encounter should also be interesting and fun, which due to varied gamer tastes are harder standards to quantify but likely benefit from the previous factors.

An interesting encounter, to me, is one that goes above and beyond a handful of orcs in a corridor or a goblin ambush on a road. In a lot of earlier-edition combat encounters you pretty much just stood next to a monster and rolled dice until someone fell over. That is not really interesting, especially if the only “consequences” are you having to take a minute to tell the Dungeon Master that you are going back to town for the night.

4th Edition combat encounters are almost always more dynamic than in previous editions, and while I do not think that the game necessarily needs that level of tactical intricacy for every fight—especially not with “trash fights”, which I will get to in a bit—having some way to mix things up would go a long way to making them more engaging. Like, fighting an orc should not be fundamentally the same as an ogre; the ogre should be able to knock the characters around, or even throw them at each other.

Both Dungeon World and Numenera (and other games) solve this pretty easily with moves and complications respectively. In Dungeon World if a character rolls within a certain range the GM can just respond with a narratively appropriate move. No back and forth, no hard mechanics, it just happens. In Numenera the GM can impose a complication in exchange for a few points of XP, or at any time a character rolls a natural 1.

These sorts of complications can also be derived from the environment; a character or enemy could get knocked into a fire pit, trampled by a horse, slip on some rubble, stuck in a bog, entangled in vines, have their axe get stuck in a door, thrown through a window, blasted by steam, and so on. The point is that these elements can really liven up an encounter, and they do not need to be incredibly complicated or require numerous dice rolls.

Another thing that makes for a great encounter is purpose. I cannot think of a book or movie where the characters go into a room, beat up some henchmen, go into another room, beat up some more, then go into yet another room and beat up even more because that sounds incredibly boring. I have played a lot of action games and some of the worse parts are when you just fight waves of faceless, unnamed enemies. Yeah, it can be fun now and then, but eventually it gets to a point where I just want it to end.

In Dungeons & Dragons these are trash fights. They are just there to pad out the adventure or get the characters some more XP, because for some reason Dungeons & Dragons is using a XP system analogous to console games and extra lives. Seriously, 4th Edition became so, so much more fun when I stopped tracking XP and leveled up the characters when I felt it was appropriate. It also made it a lot easier to plan and pace the game when I did not have to worry about cramming 10+ encounters into a single adventure.

I am not saying to ditch XP altogether—though that is perfectly viable and should at least be a supported option—but there are plenty of games out there with far, far better systems for tracking character advancement.

Speaking of things that could stand to be ditched, how about random encounters? Some argue that they convey a sense of “realism” or emphasize how the game does not just revolve around the characters and their actions (though it can and often does). I disagree with this because there are other, better ways to demonstrate that an imaginary world featuring dragons, elves, and a nonsensical magic system keeps turning when you are not paying attention:

• A history, even a brief or implied one.
• A world map, or even mentioning locations that exist beyond the confines of a local map.
• NPCs with personalities, motivations, and goals.
• Actions with far-reaching rewards and/or consequences.
• Events that occur outside their immediate sphere of influence.

To me any one of these adds more realism to a fantasy world than running into a brown bear in a forest ever could.

A more baffling claim is that without them you might as well just be pushing your players through a script. Like, if you decide ahead of time that your players run into 2d6 + 1 wolves instead of 10d10 bats (or worse, decide the number of wolves and bats ahead of time) instead of deferring to a table that they have no capacity for choice, and that you might as well just back up your books and go write a novel.

By that logic why have a Dungeon Master determine anything? WotC could just make a big book with thousands of tables for you to work through in order to generate a world, history, dominant races, cosmology, gods, etc. You could even take it a step further and just have players roll on tables to determine their race, class, skill selection, and, why not, actions taken during the game.

I think that random encounters are largely a waste of time. In some cases they might be useful, but most of the time like older-edition traps they end up being a cheap way to try and shoehorn tension and urgency into the game. If the characters are trekking through a forest trying to find a ruin, unless I think of something interesting for them to deal with on the way I am probably just going to tell them that they get to their destination after x days.

I might have them make skill checks to reduce the time if I think that supplies are even an issue (which thanks to magic in some editions it is usually not), but I do not see a point in rolling to see if they run into something, especially when there is only about a 15% chance of that happening at all, the encounter is not even relevant, and any hit to resources can just be slept off. I actually did use random encounters for about the first half of my Epiro campaign, but they so rarely came up that I decided to just start pre-planning encounters.

That is actually the closest I get to random encounters; I write encounter “cliff notes” that I keep on tap as a fall back in case the players do something expected, I think of a good spot to add them, or if there is just enough time to include them. My group only gets a handful of hours each week to get together and game, so I try to make sure that they are getting the most bang for their time, and random encounters-as-written just have a horrible return on investment.

In the end I think that great encounters should be entertaining, have a meaningful outcome (by which I mean contribute to more than the XP grind or exist just to pad out an adventure’s length), and do not always have to be immediately related to the adventure, though it certainly helps. I get that not every encounter is going to be great, but most should at least be good, and making them random is probably not going to contribute to the fun-factor. I also think that both the older XP and random encounter conventions should be thrown out.

So, what do you think makes a great encounter? Do you think that the game still needs random encounters, or players to track thousands of XP for character advancement?

Wandering Monsters: Riddle of the Sphinx

This is admittedly not a bad start for sphinx flavor and lore. Mind you it still needs some adjustments, but it is much better than many of the previous Wandering Monsters columns. First, the good.

Despite kind of treading on the angel’s concept, I do not mind the divine origin: they look different, are more grounded in the natural world, and not every god has to have angels on tap. I really like the description of various tests, from withstanding an androsphinx’s roar, to escaping a gynosphinx’s imagination zone, to fighting against a grossly unfair friend-to-foe ratio. This not only makes it easy to use them, but allows you to use them in some really inventive and memorable ways.

And now the bad, or at least the parts that I disagree with.

Being created by divine power is fine. I have nothing wrong with gods making things, especially since they are, ya know, gods. What I am less keen on is making them transformed priests and monarchs. Having to sit in one place for who knows how long just to test people would quickly become tiresome to someone with a human’s (or human-like) mind, and I cannot think of many faithful that would be doing divine backflips over the prospect of being told that, in exchange for a life of devotion and service, to stay in one spot, repeat the same test over and over for anyone that happens to drop by, and kill them if they fail.

Given a lack of mortal needs, and to a point capabilities, I see no reason to assume that they think like humans, or even mortals in general. Why would they shirk their duties? They apparently were not created with the need to eat or sleep, so why would you give them the ability become bored? I liken this to Eberron angels and demons, who are eternally locked in a never ending symbolic war against each other. They do not get bored of the fight because they are not capable of becoming bored, or even realizing the futility of it all; it is an intrinsic part of their nature.

This is a reason why I am largely against “free-range” sphinxes (or glorified hippogriffs), but I guess if I had to include them I would have them serve dead or forgotten gods. I mean they do not need to eat or sleep, so what else are they going to do with their eternity?

Another issue are the types of sphinxes. Yes, 2nd and 3rd Edition had a variety of sphinxes with random heads, capabilities, and alignments, but I am going to do something unprecedented and suggest a break from tradition: instead of establishing a quartet of sphinxes, each with a specific appearance and suite of capabilities just so you can introduce more down the road in the Next Desert Supplement, why not get rid of sphinx presets entirely and…wait for it…give us a toolbox of sphinx parts, powers, and tests?

There are a lot of gods. They have their own portfolios, and many have an animal associated with them: Ares has his boars, Horus has falcons, and so on. So while some might go with the standard male-lion package, a female god of war might want a female-lion, or even female-wolf, to test someone’s valor. What about a god that creates a kind of skeletal, bat-winged sphinx that tests fear? I get that yeah, you can homebrew your own sphinxes and change the flavor, but I think it would be a lot better if they made things more inclusive and easier from the start, instead of doing what anyone can do and swap faces and spell-like abilities.

Speaking of spell-like abilities, given the lists that some of them had in 3rd Edition I am surprised that they each seem to only have one defining trait. 4th Edition proved that you can have quality over quantity (both in terms of spells and monsters), so hopefully they do something unique and interesting instead of just referring you to the spell chapter in the Player’s Handbook.

What I am also hoping is that if an androsphinx decides to test your valor by having you withstand its roar, or you have to escape from a gynosphinxes maze-effect that it boils down to more than just making a saving throw and calling it good. Really the other, more complex tests are the best part of the article, so rather than directing us to a dimensional pocket spell, or citing hard rules and restrictions for building extraplanar testing grounds, it would be nice if all we got were some examples and advice on making a fun, memorable encounter.

Like, if the sphinx wants to test your endurance by forcing you to climb a cliff in a storm, maybe even while fighting off flying monsters, it should not need to have control weather, summon monster y, and, I dunno, greater conjure cliffs; it can just do all of those things because that is what you need it to do. So that is where I stand. Make them somewhat alien in their thoughts and mannerisms, give them unique capabilities that not just any mid- to high-level wizard can do in a couple six seconds, and give us the tools to customize them on a god-by-god, test-by-test basis.

D&D Next: Miss-conceptions

Great Weapon Fighting
When you miss a target with a melee weapon that you are wielding in two hands, the target still takes damage from the weapon. The damage equals your Strength modifier. The weapon must have the two-handed benefit or versatile property to gain this benefit.
–Classes, pg 25

Now that is a very clunky read, but given that part of D&D Next‘s design philosophy is restructuring the format so that you have to sift through walls of text to get the necessary details I am not really surprised.

A much easier, yet just as clear way to write it could be:

When you miss a target while wielding a two-handed or versatile melee weapon in two hands, the weapon deals damage to the target equal to your Strength modifier.

(EDITED: There ya go Svafa and Justin.)

Same results at half the text. You are welcome. The only other thing I might change is so that the fighter has to at least roll a 10+, or take a page from 13th Age and make it work on an even/odd die result. 4th Edition had reaping strike, which also did damage on a miss, and that never bothered me or upset the game in the slightest…so of course some people are really upset about it. At least when it pertains to non-magical miss damage because, you know, non-magical.

Personally I do not get it. Dungeons & Dragons has always had, to put it lightly, very abstract rules. Take hit points for example: they represent a combination of your physical fortitude, combat aptitude, luck, mental resolve, “plot armor”, etc. Where some games give you a physical and mental pool to individually track, Dungeons & Dragons kind of lumps it all up together. Certainly it is easier to manage, but then you run into the problem of how cure light wounds restores damage if you are not even wounded.

So why take umbrage with damage on a miss?

Some think that a miss should just be a miss. While this might make sense it discards the fact that a miss has really never meant that the attack failed to connect at all, unless for some reason you believe that wearing plate armor and packing a tower shield makes you somehow better at dodging. Especially for characters without a Dexterity bonus or, worse yet, a penalty, misses more often than not mean that you did get hit, but it just failed to inflict any appreciable damage.

You can see another example of this in Next by taking a look at the barbarian class: one class feature lets you add your Constitution modifier to your Armor Class so long as you are not wearing any armor at all. So what does that mean? Is the barbarian somehow better at dodging because she is incredibly tough? No, it means that she is so tough that she is able to ignore minor wounds, ie “misses”.

Another claim is simulation. As in they do not like the idea of a character that can never miss. This kind of plays upon the previous point, but there the fact that Dungeons & Dragons is not only horrible when it comes to simulation, and hit points do not, and never have universally represented physical trauma. A fighter that takes that feature is not always hitting things. Rather her blows hammer shields so hard that it rattles her foe, or her swings force them to exert themselves trying to keep out of the way, or maybe she is just be scary as fuck swinging a giant axe.

The thing is that what hit points mean has always been dependent on context. If you are attacking an orc then to a point they represent varying degrees of exertion, combat prowess, and physical damage. If you are attacking a goblin then they are likely more representative of prowess, luck, and resolve than anything else. It is when you get into to stuff like mindless undead, elementals, or big, tough monsters that making them represent “meat” points is probably going to be more appropriate.

Here is another exercise in context: if a giant throws a rock at you and hits, do you interpret it that the rock actually struck your character? No, you would be crushed. Even if it was just a glancing blow you would at least have broken bones, something more than some damage that not only affects you in no way, but that you can walk off in a day or so. Same thing for a dragon: do you honestly think any living person would survived getting blasted by fire, or taking the brunt of a multiattack routine?

Now a huge factor is magic. For the longest time Dungeons & Dragons often two different task resolution systems for swords and sorcery (some of the time, anyway), and for some the only way for magic to seem magical is if it continues to use different rules or even ignore them entirely. Why? I have no idea: Mage: The Ascension, FATE, Numenera, 13th Age, Dungeon World, Shadowrun, and 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons all resolve tasks the same way, and I do not hear anyone making the argument that magic in those games does not seem…magical enough.

Another major trend for spells? Half damage on a miss. Not all spells do this, mind you, but enough to where people seem to get hung up and think that it should be the purview of magic for no discernible reason other than “this is how it worked before”. Some argue that it “makes sense” for area-effect spells like fireball, because you have to dodge so much–ignoring the fact that you can still somehow take half damage even in a small pit–but then is it really that much of a stretch to allow a fighter with a specific ability to force one enemy to have to “dodge so much” with a big weapon?

Finally the last argument that I found was that–despite Dungeons & Dragons have a lot of exception-based design–allowing fighters to (not really) “hit” on a “miss” will somehow onfuse players. The d20 system is built around the simple idea that you roll a d20, add some modifiers, and try to beat a number to determine success; if anything were to violate that universal truth? Well…probably nothing, because again there are already many rules exceptions built into the game:

• Elves cannot be put to sleep.
• Uncanny Dodge causing you to take no damage on a successful Dexterity save.
• Magic missile deals automatic damage (except in 4th Edition, for awhile anyway).
• Melf’s acid arrow deals half damage on a miss despite being single target spell.
• Alert prevents you from being surprised, ever.
• Mobile prevents you from taking opportunity attacks against the target you attack.
• Polearm Master allows you to make opportunity attacks against creatures that enter your reach.
• Stealthy allows you to hide when only lightly obscured.
• Goblins can hide at the end of their turn without spending an action.

There are more I am sure, but you get the idea.

So maybe people are opposed to this because they for some reason think that 4th Edition is the worst thing to happen to the game, ever. Maybe they dislike it because it was not in previous editions. Maybe despite all the other rules exceptions, abstract nature of hit points, and other reasonable explanations they do not understand it, or do not want to understand it. Ultimately it is just one ability that–fighter players have to consciously choose, mind you–is guaranteed to inflict a trivial amount of damage on a miss. It is not going to ruin encounters, or break the game.

Legends & Lore: Warlock Design

Given that the warlock is one of my favorite classes in Dungeons & Dragons of all time, it is comforting that at least this time I only see potential issues in today’s Legends & Lore.

I never played a warlock in 3rd Edition. It seemed like a two-trick pseudo-sorcerer that was created as a mechanical experiment to see if it would be possible to permit a character to cast a couple of spells whenever they wanted to. Of course given that magic does not have to let you circumvent the rules of the game the answer is yes, it was just a fairly lackluster execution.

4th Edition made them into a distinct, interesting concept: unlike wizards, who study magic, and sorcerers, who have magic in their blood, warlocks bargain for it. It also provided a variety of pacts to choose from; infernal, fey, star, and eventually vestige and gloom. Each pact had a separate benefit associated with it, and while you were not forced or limited to your spell selection, many received additional benefits if you had a specific pact. Plus there were also numerous feats and paragon paths to choose from, too.

For now Next‘s warlock will retain 4th Edition’s flavor, in which you choose a patron that gives you access to power in exchange for something else or ongoing “employment”. It would be nice to see the patron as a more involved force, but this will do for now. I am also liking the three types of suggested pacts: blade (4th Edition’s hexblade subclass), book (more spells than the rest), and chain (summoning/binding planar critters). They sound pretty evocative and diverse, as do some of the other things mentioned (summoned minion serving as a magical conduit), so what could go wrong?

Well, at least four things.

The first is execution. Summoning a weapon and casting spells is the easy part, it is summoning monsters and bossing them around that might cause issues. In 3rd Edition you could summon an army of monsters and basically play your own party, while 4th Edition made it so that it either cost you actions to command your “pets”, or gave them instinctive actions that they would do on their own if not told otherwise. While this might sound good in theory (hey, free action), this could include a giant spider munching down on whoever was unfortunate to be the closest at the time.

The second is patrons. The article only refers to the patron in regards to the book pact. The 4th Edition hexblade had access to a weapon thematic to your pact, and I think that summoning monsters could certainly benefit from a patron’s type (devils for infernal, tentacled horrors for star, etc). I am hoping that these two pacts are not relegated to “vanilla” capabilities, especially since 4th Edition pretty much does the work for them.

Then we have the pacts themselves. I know I said that they sound neat and distinct, but I am guessing that this means WotC will lazily construct three subclass packages with a handful of needlessly divided features, forcing you to isolate yourself to one category early on in your career. It would be great to see a talent tree structure that lets you customize your character as you progress instead of locking you in, but given all the limitations we have seen so far I am not holding my breath.

Finally, magic. Warlocks started out with all at-will magic, then they followed 4th Edition’s mostly unified power structure. I mostly-liked the warlock’s mechanics in the previous packets, but would not be surprised if they just give them daily spells limited by your patron. What I would love to see is if they actually sit down, think about how warlock magic works, and create mechanics that support that explanation.

If I were in charge, here is how I would do it:

• Your patron provides access to thematically appropriate spells and other features. It makes sense for a patron to only be able to dole out magic appropriate to its own capabilities.
• Each warlock starts with eldritch blast, flavored as a burst of raw, magical energy. They might look different and have different effects based on pact (like fire for infernal). 
• You would also start with access to a thematic spell or two, which would be usable at-will or burn some sort of point mechanic, flavored as the warlock’s body “burning out”. You could perform a ritual to get in touch with your patron to swap them.
• You would get a choice as to how to specialize your character at the start: if you choose blade, you can summon a weapon, book gets you another spell, while chain lets you conjure things. Each time you level you get to purchase a new talent, upgrade an older one, etc.
• You have a “sign” that starts small, but gets more obvious as you level up, potentially revealing your allegiance at a glance.
• You can contact your patron to ask questions or for favors. You might have to exchange something or do something later on, but the character is an investment after all.

With this players get to choose how they progress, and can determine their complexity as they go. None of that “per-day” leveled magic, forcing you to stick with a subclass, or barring off other options for no good reason.