Legend & Lore: A Different Way To Blah

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What? No…just…what?

Having actually played 3rd Edition, attacks of opportunity might not have actually come up all the time–though they were pretty common–but the fact that they existed affected how characters moved and what they did. For example, if the wizard was on the ropes the fighter might want to go save his ass, but in the process might take an ogre’s greatclub in the face for his troubles. Does he provoke it and try anyway? Up to him. The fact is, we knew the rules, even if knowing the rules just made us do shit to not have to use them.

No, the rules should not become more complex simply by leveling. Being able to run circles around an orc or fire an arrow in his face while right next to him from levels 1-5, but not at levels 6 and up, is both inconsistent and makes no fucking sense. It would be fine to simply have a modular ruleset where you can simply ignore them (which you already can), but it would be best to just make a game that is simple and elegant to learn and play, which 4th Edition already is.

To me the game already gets more complicated the higher level you get. Having players pick up more abilities, class features, feats that can change more, and magic items that can do more is sufficient complexity. At low levels the players mainly concern themselves with a handful of powers and feats with varying complexity. I have seen players just default to feats that give them passive bonuses to their stats because they don’t want to have to think too much, and avoid powers that have triggering requirements.

I remember trying a paragon tier barbarian and having plenty of trouble remembering that oh, I spent an action point so this happens, and because I have these feats and I am raging I also get some more bonuses. On top of all this, you want to also increase the rules as you go along? Call me crazy, but the fact that not all groups even hit paragon tier probably makes it even more likely that these level-based rules would be ignored or forgotten.

Legend & Lore: Out of Bounds

I have really gotta stop reading these things, because all they do is confuse, frustrate, and make me wonder exactly what game Monte Cook was allegedly playing “back in the day”. 

Does the game present players with challenges that have pre-made solutions?

Kind of? There are useful guidelines and suggestions for the budding DM—such as how to unlock doors, scale walls, and disarm traps—but ultimately it is the DM’s decision to design, place, and either limit or encourage how the players overcome them. Just because a trap can be disarmed with a Thievery check or have its hit points smashed out of it does not mean that there could not be a clearly visible lever that shuts it off, or a password that disables a magical trap.

For example, can all monsters be defeated in straightforward ways, which is to say, attacked with swords and magic missiles until they die? Can all physical obstacles (walls to climb, narrow ledges to traverse, rivers to cross, and so forth) be overcome with die rolls? Are those die rolls achievable given the PCs’ level and abilities? Is the solution to every puzzle available to those with the right skills or spells? Is the counter or resolution to every problem hardwired into the game?

Generally yeah, monsters can be defeated in the ways that players expect, and this has been globally true over the course of every edition. I am wondering how Cook handled climbing walls in 2^nd Edition. Did he require a die roll? Did he just decide on a whim whether they succeeded or failed? Did he give them a bonus/let them succeed if they described their technique well enough? I mean if there is a wall, and the players want to climb it, and there is a consequence for failure, then yeah I will make them roll.

I fail to see how requiring dice rolling to determine success for meaningful actions or challenges corresponds to every challenge (or any) having a hardwired solution. Just because I require players to make a Strength check to bash open an iron-bound door or a Thievery check to pick the lock, does not mean that those are the only solutions I will allow. If a player wants to try conning a guard out of a key, or get someone to open the door by making noise, pose as another NPC, or just bash it open, then I can make a judgment call (and again probably require a dice roll, like a Bluff check).

As a DM I have never just thrown random shit at my players and assume that they would just figure something out. Generally I had at least one solution to the problem even if that solution was in the next room (or even the next dungeon). Hell, they might find a door with a very high Thievery check that they will have to come back to later. It might even be guarded by constructs that are way too tough for them to defeat.

Looking back at the game’s roots, the answer to these questions was usually no. In the early days, the game’s mechanics rarely provided solutions to the problems the characters faced. Players stretched beyond the bounds of the rules and looked for solutions not covered in the books. Player ingenuity was always the key to winning encounters. And very often, the DM didn’t actually have a set solution in mind ahead of time. He expected the PCs to come up with something on their own.

To put it nicely, this is not the way I remember it. Players generally relied on their characters’s strengths, which was usually something to the effect of stabbing or blasting monsters, picking locks on doors, bashing doors open, etc. Things that all required dice rolls. I remember playing a fighter and trying to lie to a NPC to get them to let their guard down, and the DM had me make a Charisma check to see how well I pulled it off. The only thing that has changed over time is that actual, solid mechanics have been provided to help DMs adjudicate their decisions and players get a better bead on stuff that their characters could reasonably do.

This isn’t true of more recent expressions of the game. There are few encounters that can’t be won simply by using the PCs’ straightforward powers and abilities. For example, consider fire immunity. In older versions of the game, the red dragon was immune to fire. If you’re packing fireballs, you’re just out of luck. In the most recent version of the game, the designers decided that it’s no fun if the game tells you that the choices you made were wrong, so red dragons are resistant to fire, but not immune. You can still use your fireballs.

The game still “punishes” them, it just does not render them utterly useless. If you fight a red dragon then fire attacks can do something, just not nearly as well as they otherwise would. It still has an impact. It still has meaning. Aside from making some thematic characters take a back seat during what will probably be an epic battle I see no benefit to this, and I thought Monte Cook had moved away from the whole system mastery philosophy? 

That’s a viable design approach. You make sure that no choices are bad choices. You make sure that every lock has a key that can be found. Every barrier has a way past it. You ensure that the PCs are never presented with a challenge that they can’t somehow overcome. You encourage the players to roll some dice and then move on to the next thing.

There should be no “bad” choices. Again just because the game makes it more difficult for a character to be rendered obsolete, does not mean that every challenge has to have a way around it. Not having “bad” choices does not mean that everything has to have an obvious or immediate solution. These two things are not related.

Now imagine a simple dungeon room. There’s a pile of treasure on the far side. The PCs come in and quickly discover that an impenetrable force field blocks the far side of the room from them. In an “old school” dungeon, the players would be forced to figure out a way to get past the force field or somehow get beyond it to reach the treasure. The DM might have no preset solution in mind. It might very well be impossible for the characters, given their resources, to get the treasure.

Which differs from recent editions how? I can throw a forcefield in a dungeon on a whim with no clear way of getting past it. I can even say that it cannot be damaged. I could throw in a monster that cannot be hurt by non-magical weapons, or weapons period. Or even hurt by a specific weapon. The closest parallel I can think of are 2^nd Edition monsters that were immune to weapons without a minimum bonus, and if DM’s really want to do that then they still can without needing WotC’s approval.

As the game developed over the years, solutions were inserted into that encounter’s design. Perhaps there’s a lever somewhere else in the dungeon that lowers the field. Maybe a spell or the right combination of spells would bring down the barrier. Perhaps a secret passage circumvents the force field. Or maybe just pounding on it long enough will destroy the barrier.

This statement bothers me for two main reasons. The first is because he seems to believe that spells that let players instantly bypass challenges—comprehend languages, detect secret doors, knock, break enchantment, disintegrate, dispel magic, passwall, find the path, miracle, etc—did not exist before. If anything 4^th Edition has reduced the number of abilities that allow characters to say fuck all and just skip obstacles.

The second is that he acts like that DMs who designed encounters just plopped shit down on paper without any clue as to what players might do about it. Maybe it is just me but as a rule of thumb when I design encounters I consider my group demographic and at least one way for the players to get by. Well, assuming I want them to.

And maybe that’s really the takeaway here. The rules are not the sum total of the game. The game is larger than that. Breaking the rules, circumventing the rules, or ignoring the rules does not take you out of the game. The game encompasses that type of play. It’s built upon it, in fact. So why shouldn’t the design of the game also be bigger than the rules? Why shouldn’t those kind of assumptions be taken into account? It puts the responsibility back in the hands of the players, rather than the DM or the designer. Success or failure lies within their own hands again.

More importantly how the hell does doing away with a solid foundation of mutable rules put responsibility back into the hands of the players? As a DM I like having something to go off of, and as a player I like generally knowing what to expect when I try to do something. Personally it sounds like WotC already has a plan for an upcoming edition, and at least these articles are steeling for me a change that I seriously doubt I am going to like. Maybe I am just reading it wrong, but the threads on the WotC forums and RPG.net are not giving me much hope.

Legends & Lore: Magic & Mystery

Sigh…I guess I’ll just take it from the top…

What I can gather is that Cook wants to remove magic items from character advancement altogether,  rewarding characters with better loot for tackling harder shit, and “re-injecting the magic back into magic”. While I can get behind this mission statement you can already resolve the first two “issues” using current rules in 4th Edition thanks to inherent bonuses, and a DM being able to place whichever monsters and magic items that she wants. Nothing he is saying is exactly new or innovative, and like many others makes me wonder if he has even read about the game that he is writing articles about. There is however a problem with how he wants to solve this problem:

His example cites a 4th-level character packing a +3 sword, with the understanding that if a character is smart and/or lucky enough, that she could feasibly get one and be better off for it. Since generally campaigns–whether adventure paths or episodic–involve the DM planning stuff with a rough challenge level and treasure already in mind, this is something that I guess I could see happening in a non-structured sandbox game where the players could hear about monsters and explore them at their leisure, though it does carry some problems:

The first is that if I am running a campaign and the characters hear about a dungeon or something with monsters consistently higher than they are, and still try to tackle it that they are most likely going to die. Maybe not in the first encounter, and maybe not in the second, but once they start running out of resources (or run into a bout of bad luck) if I do not start pulling punches then I could easily be out a party, or forced to find some contrived way to keep them alive.

The second is that if they succeed, then I either have to find some way to try and balance the encounters so that the guy with the good loot is challenged without making it impossible for anyone else to contribute, or run things business as usual, making things much easier for her (basically 3rd Edition Syndrome all over again). Here is a fun fact: if you want to reward your characters with better items than their level would indicate without drastically altering game balance, you can always use the rarity and artifact rules, which yet again already exist.

As for the mystery of magic items, he claims that this was lost in later editions–ie, 3rd and 4th–both because magic items are “expected” and because players can buy whatever the hell they want (though the rarity system introduced last year prevents you from buying uncommon and rare items).

This is one of many arguments that detractors of 4th Edition have made in the past, and it makes me wonder what version of D&D they played before: ever since 2nd Edition at least, magic items and spells have always had clearly defined effects, which more often than not could be gleaned through a simple identify spell (though 4th Edition made it easier with an Arcana check). However as one forum-goer put it, there are plenty of examples from mythology of clear-cut magic and magic items, so I am not sure they were ever very mysterious.

In a nutshell, everything that Cook proposes can be handled using the rules you already own, and if this was not disappointing enough he wraps up things with a very black and white poll: why does it have to be something that is decided by either the DM or the player? It does not. There is nothing wrong with players being able to buy some things and craft others, while still leaving the DM with some control.

A Matter of Perception

Cook’s Legend & Lore debut involves him essentially recreating the Passive Perception wheel, ie the system we have now, except that instead of using Passive Perception as-is with numerical DCs he proposes a rank system (novice, journeyman, expert, etc). That is it, and it just feels like he is arguing semantics. The fact that the rules for Passive Perception have existed for years, including in part in 3rd Edition’s take 10 rule, has lead some to believe that perhaps Cook was trying to make a (bad) joke.

Currently if a character’s Passive Perception meets or beats the DC to find something, then they notice it. Easy. Otherwise they can declare that they are searching a room and make an actual roll, giving them the chance to find something that a cursory examination missed. You can adjust DCs up and down to account for player actions and methods, or even for having other trained skills (for example, you might consider giving a character a bonus on Perception checks to find hidden doors if they are also trained in Dungeoneering).

Cook’s system gives things a rank, which is used to determine if characters automatically succeed, have to make a roll, or just cannot succeed. The difference between the trained and untrained characters is that a rank that you cannot succeed at can be rolled against, and one that requires rolling is an auto-pass. Additionally players can describe their actions and methods, potentially reducing the rank, which can give a character that otherwise could not roll a roll, or a character rolling an auto-pass.

It sounds very similar, but there are some issues that crop up on further examination.

One issue is a lack of granularity. Currently Cook cites only five labels, while DCs can be any number you like. This allows you much better control over fine-tuning a DC, as well as the modifiers that items and circumstances provide, as opposed to simply saying that you pass, can roll, or are fucked. It also vastly increases the opportunities characters have at succeeding at tasks, even if the odds are stacked against them, without having to resort to “Zorking” or pixel-bitching.

I do not want my players to have to result to zorking just because they lack a sufficient rank to make a roll to try and succeed at something. Cook uses a statue as an example of this method, describing a situation where  a player can ask if the teeth can be moved in order to “make the impossible possible”, and honestly the only difference I see between allowing a roll by default and requiring them to ask me 20 questions in order to get a roll is wasted time.

Cook claims that this method will avoid the purported issue of players assuming that a low roll–or the DM rolling in general–means that they must have overlooked something and trying to rationalize another roll or continuing to muck about anyway, but I do not think it will change anything; if the DM simply tells them that they do not find anything, it could be that it was an auto-pass or auto-fail, and if they have to roll they could still jump to the same conclusions.

I do not need to have labels. If I want–or need–the players to succeed, then I can just make the DC really low, or better yet, not require a roll at all. Sometimes I even allow characters to automatically succeed on some skill checks if they are trained in the skill (something I saw in an adventure that I cannot remember). If I for some reason want to peg it at an area where only some characters can auto-succeed, I can make it so that the DC can be passed on a low number, even a 1. I think that really the only thing I can not do (or at least not easily/reliably do) is generate a DC that untrained characters just cannot pass, while trained characters can still roll; there almost always seems to be a slim chance that even untrained characters can succeed.

Cook’s proposed “changes” to the skill system seems to hinder more than it helps, and again I think it is important to note that you can easily do what Cook is “suggesting” using the current system without giving it an overhaul: just give out bonuses to the character if they suggest something clever, which is something that DMs honestly should have already been doing.

Legend & Lore: DM Rules & Exciting News

While I agree with the bullet list on the first half of the article, the part that really caught my eye was the bit where Mearls not only passes the column off to Monte Cook, but also states that he has been brought onto R&D. While I am familiar with Arcana Unearthed, I had a much greater exposure to Planescape, which I was not even aware he was part of (hey, it has been awhile since I checked the books). Really the part where I both stopped caring and was glad to see him go, was when he openly stated that he deliberately designed “trap” options in 3rd Edition to promote system mastery.

Thankfully someone found a new article where he admits that that way of thinking was not good, and I guess since then he has moved past “ivory tower” design (his words), so hopefully this means that he will not–or will not be able to–drag the game back into the past. At this point I am about where I was back when 4th Edition was announced; I hope that the game will be fun, but am unsure without seeing what Wizards of the Coast’s plan on the whole is for the game, as well as how much clout Monte carries to the table. It could be possible that even if he wants to go back to an edition with save-or-die effects and where spellcasters are pointlessly overpowered, that he will be “vetoed” by the majority rule.

I guess that despite the sinking feeling of uncertainty I am glad that there are still some book releases left to go with an already extensive library: if 4th Edition moves in a direction that I do not like or if 5th Edition comes out and it sucks, then I will still have decades of comfortable gaming ahead of me. Of course, maybe his ideas coupled with more modernized game design will yield positive results? I wish that Mearls would come out and clarify some nagging details and/or be more transparent, but until then this is yet another “wait and see” instance.