Legends & Lore: Managing Magic & Complexity

Magic is one aspect of Dungeons & Dragons I have never fully enjoyed, so when I hear Mearls make references to “fighting with tools designed for previous wars”, and that they are kind of, but not really changing magic, I just apathetically sigh.

The added flexibility is all well and good, but I feel like they are not really making the most of this playtest by giving us numerous spellcasting systems to play with, and/or some optional rules to really spice things up. At this point I would settle for a mechanics that, if a wizard tried to explain it to someone, would make sense, or at the least some interesting flavor.

As it stands the mechanics are boring, predictable, and safe, things that I would not normally associate with magic. Let us see the variant magic systems we keep hearing about. Bring back the sorcerer and warlock, and maybe some other classes while you are at it. Throw some optional rules like exhaustion, sacrifices, or other variables at us and see what sticks (3rd Edition’s Unearthed Arcana has a lot of this stuff, by the way). This is a playtest, so let us try something out besides pseudo-Vancian.

While I am less than thrilled about the current state (and the future) of magic, I am more optimistic about giving the players the choice to enhance existing abilities or pick up new ones. Assuming everything goes to plan, this could allow players that want complex characters to branch out, or just stick to a handful of stuff if they do not want to bog themselves down with too many options. The problem is if they design abilities that are too good to simply not pass up, such as an accuracy or damage boosting option, particularly one without a cost.

I think that this–as well as flexible NPC stat blocks–would be a great way to avoid a kind of entry bar, without saddling the new player with a simple and ineffective class like the fighter. 4th Edition’s Essentials line made classes even simpler, but did not sacrifice efficacy. I am running a 3rd Edition Age of Worms campaign at work, and while I wanted to introduce a new player by having her roll a fighter so as to avoid overwhelming her, I instead opted for a warblade because despite it being slightly more complicated it would be effective for a much longer period of time.

Really if you want to make it easy to teach new people to play the game, make sure that you create a kind of cheap, “red box” product to go with it from the start. Star Wars: Edge of the Empire made it very easy for both the players and game master to learn as they go, and there is no reason why you could not do the same and allow players to ease themselves in. In fact, you could do something like this for each mode of play as people become more familiar with the system.

Legends & Lore: Combat Superiority

3rd Edition gave us fighters that purported to have lots of flexibility, but ultimately failed at doing what they were supposed to be doing; you had no way of effectively stopping monsters from attacking the more dangerous characters, rangers could do the two-weapon schtick better (and easier), and numerous spellcasting classes could just buff themselves beyond anything a fighter could dream of, in- and outside of combat.

Really unless you wanted to ineffectually “button-mash” attack over and over, your only non-optimized option was to go with archery (though I hear spell-buffed rangers still got the monopoly, there).

4th Edition reined in spellcasters and gave fighters complex and meaningful options, allowing them to dominate the arena of weaponry (and tanking). No longer could clerics and wizards slap on a bunch of buffing spells–while still being able to bypass the hit point mechanic entirely and do other things–and no longer could druids wildshape into exotic animals that allowed them to make multiple attacks at their full bonus, before the fighter could even make a second attack at a huge penalty.

Players were rightfully concerned that the fighter was being dragged back into a darker age, where all they could do was fumble about and hit things for a brief period of time in which they could do it reasonably better than some other classes (or, more accurately, longer in an “adventuring day”). Classes that had skills, interesting features, and/or spells that let them affect groups of monsters, make skill checks that they normally could not (often with a bonus when it was not outright success), fly, boost their stats, and more.

Given that we were only shown a low-level snapshot, I cannot say for certain if the Next fighter was going to be like that. With the flat math, better skill distribution and flexibility, and heavier reliance on ability scores it is possible that a fighter might have fared better. They even got multiple attacks at level 2, albeit only twice per day, but at least it was without a penalty and could be used for more things than just attacks. However, wizards were still reliant on pseudo-Vancian magic, and fighters did not have any attack options except “hit it” (though to be fair, it was a crapload of damage).

For those concerned about going back to boring fighters, I think that this is promising news; fighters get dice that they can spend to add extra damage, reduce damage that they are taking, block attacks, and presumably much, much more. They refresh each round, which kind of reminds me of the warblade from Book of Nine Swords, though they had to spend an attack action to refresh their maneuvers, so it was more like every other round.

Most people are making comparisons to Dungeon Crawl Classic’s Mighty Deed of Arms, which basically lets you make a kind of special attack based on your description and the GM’s permission whenever your attack die–a die that you roll in place of a flat attack bonus value–comes up 3 or higher. Example deeds including things like gouging out a basilisks’ eye, impaling two monsters on one spear, and disarms. I would also comapare it to Stunts in Dragon Age, which you could use if the Dragon Die came up a certain number or higher.

I like it because it avoids going with a static bonus and provides the fighter with a simple resource to manage, both of which makes them more interesting. While I do not think that each class needs a unique resource management system, I think this is fine because it operates in a similar manner to 4th Edition in that it grants a sense of “narrative control” (and, ironically, the rate at which you gain maneuvers is similar to 4th Edition). I also like it because for those who want a simple fighter, you can just opt to use them for a damage bonus and call it good.

D&D Next Blog: Modularity and Combat Subsystems

In 3rd Edition (and probably older editions) there were combat actions that anyone could try to do; disarm, trip, bull rush (ie, pushing), sunder, grapple, etc. Given that trying any of these things usually let your opponent make a free attack, you did so at a penalty, and the creature’s size, number of legs, Strength, and Hit Dice (of which the latter two usually exceeded your own) could be a factor, the key word was try. Now, if a player chose to specialize in a particular maneuver (gattling chain trippers come to mind) you could pull these off fairly well until you started going up against big and/or mult-legged adversaries (giants and dragons).

Ultimately this resulted in my group basically never really bothering. The risk was too great, and both the chances and payoff were often pretty low. 4th Edition made grab and bull rush pretty easy–yet pretty pointless–to do, but largely got rid of the other maneuvers by restricting them for better or worse to specific powers; if you had a power that knocked a creature prone, or push/pull/slide, then it basically always worked even if you factored in size. Otherwise you “officially” could not do any of these things, even tripping, unless your DM was willing to houserule an exploit in (which from experience was actually pretty easy).

The current proposal is to create a 3rd Edition-style list of maneuvers that anyone can take a stab at, penalty and all. Want to knock someone down? Make an attack at -5, unless they have 3-4 legs, in which case it is -10, and it will not work at all if the target has more than 4 legs or is bigger than you. You can also take a -2 to hit in order to deal bonus damage, which is not nearly so punishing (and can be largely offset if you use the proposed +1 bonus from flanking). Tom mentions that the “fighter’s actual maneuvers don’t require a penalty to the attack”, though I am not sure if this also applies to maneuvers that anyone can take via feats, if non-fighters get reduced penalties, or what (and I wonder how well this will hold up with those dissatisfied by 4th Edition’s justification of martial-exploit narrative control).

On one hand I dislike this approach, because imposing an attack penalty goes back to 3rd Edition’s risk/reward issues. -5 is pretty steep, even without giving the enemy a free attack for your troubles. In other words, it kind of gives you the illusion of choice; yeah, you can try these things, but why not just stick to the tried-and-true attack/spell/whatever you are actually good at? On the other hand I guess I kind of like it in that it discourages special-attack spamming for non-fighters, who can basically cash in attack advantage to negate the penalty (well, the -2 and -5 ones anyway). I could see such characters using opportune moments to do something cool.

Personally I would prefer a system that allowed characters with maneuvers to make an attack, and if the attack hits do something else by spending a resource (ie, Dragon Age’s stamina), having feats from a tree (something like Fantasy Craft’s weapon trees), or force a saving throw (potentially with a penalty if the weapon makes sense, like hammers for knockdown or spears for tripping). You could even combine one or more. Unfortunately as I mentioned above, I do not think this will sit well with the people who disliked martial-attacks-as-narrative-control.

As a side note, I find it odd that Tom seems excited about facing rules.

Rule of Three: Tactical Combat, Maneuvers, and Vancian Magic

While two out of three is normally a pretty good ratio of success, the part that I did not like was the one that mattered the most to me:

Despite owning Players Option: Combat & Tactics for many years, I never used the rules on facing. Actually I never used most of the rules, though if I did facing would be a pretty low priority. It makes me think of combat in Final Fantasy Tactics, where you took turns with enemies running around each other like some kind of reverse-prison-rules-murder-dance. I like that the rules packages are presented more  “cafeteria style” as opposed to bundles; your group can decide to give tactical combat a whirl, but strip out things like facing. If you are feeling particularly perverse, you can instead just use facing.

Maneuvers sound a lot like a transition spot between 3rd and 4th Edition: there is a base group of things that anyone can try to do, like grab, trip, pushing, etc, in addition to options that anyone can pick up that let them do those things plus an attack (the example cited being tide of iron). People have voiced criticism in how the fighter can avoid sucking in games without feats (or when compared to classes that get their toys and more), but I guess somewhere Mearls specifically mentioned that fighters will get things besides maneuvers. I am curious as to how flexible maneuvers will actually be; will most anyone be able to buy and use them, or will the end up being trap-like options?

So far so good, but then we get to…vancian magic. Again with the pseudo-Vancian magic.

The last time I voiced my opinion of this, someone posted a link with a decent explanation of actual Vancian magic from one of the Dying Earth books (I assume). While I liked what I read, Dungeons & Dragons does not convey that kind of flavor. Rather than making them seem like living entities with a hard limit that wizards can retain (like, four), it just kind of glosses over it and sums things up magic as a fire-and-forget per-day resource (oh, and depending on what edition wizards cannot wear armor for some reason…unless they can). I guess it is a difference of how Yoda explained the force in Episode V and how it was chalked up as micro-organisms in Episode I.

Currently the wizard sounds like it is set to pseudo-Vance, though I am hoping that the final result has wizards that have better explained mechanics (ideally with no more spell levels), or a variant magic system to satisfy those with different cravings.