What Does Not Kill You
I would estimate that 100% or more of the encounter design articles I’ve read focus on making the encounters more challenging, more difficult, and more punishing. These creatures create a deadly synergy, this terrain will hamper the characters’ movement, that power will make your players weep uncontrollably, rendering their character sheets unreadable. Given the astounding capabilities of today’s characters and the brilliant tactical acumen of today’s players, this is entirely understandable. It’s become harder to drive that splinter of uncertainty, of worry, of–dare I say it–fear into the hearts of players, so DMs really do need new and exciting ways of marching in the terror. [Read the rest of this article]
We Are the Champions: DM Challenge at Pax East 2010
As you may have heard by now, I won the DM’s Challenge, put together by WotC on the Saturday of Pax. For weeks, since it was announced, ChattyDM and I have been trash talking and hyping each other up about the event. For a while, I was worried that the event wouldn’t run due to lack of participants. Boy, was I wrong.
Photo by @Wizards_DnD
What is the DM Challenge? DMs come up with an adventure using the following parameters, then run it:
The adventure should play in about 5 hours. You should write approximately 4 combat encounters for your adventure; you must write at least 3 combat encounters, but no more than 5. Levels for the encounters should not be lower than 4 or higher than 9; you should endeavor to write a total of about 26 levels’ worth of combat encounters (that would parse out into two 6th-level fights and two 7th-level fights). You can, of course, add skill challenges and roleplaying encounters to your adventure to give it a cool story.
We were also given the theme that it should involve the Underdark, especially any elements from the book itself.
It actually took me a while to come up with the spine of the adventure. Eventually, Chatty and I worked out the same solution for each of our adventures: steal liberally from previous adventures. It was only when I was in a sinus infection-induced sleep deprivation that the title came to me that made everything fit: The Lost Treasure of Torog. (Alternatively titled The Legend of Torog’s Gold, but rejected a City Slickers 2 reference for some reason). [Read the rest of this article]
Cheeseburger, Plain
This year, I turn 35. I am long past the age when I realized some things make me feel old. It was extremely depressing the first time I looked at a hot college girl and realized I was in high school when she was born. It was extremely depressing the year I realized that me and spicy food just don’t mix. (However, I did get a large amount of reading done that year.) As a gamer, it is really strange to be able to explain to my Castlevania-obsessed nephew about how a large majority of the games in that series over the last 25 years are about Simon Belmont’s relatives, and to remember playing all of them when they first came out (when I was 10).
Whether it is age or just my natural propensity toward nitpicking remains to be seen – but it seems that the older I get, the more certain things annoy me, both in gaming and in life. The thought that has been lately whipping my brain into a fevered desire to lecture all you young whippersnappers in how it was better in the good old days is that everything always has to be “taken to the next level” or everybody will think it’s lame.
I mean, if a character’s drinking a healing potion, why can’t they just, I dunno, pull a flask out of their backpack and drink it and say “ahh” as their health bar is replenished? Is it really necessary that they throw their head back and levitate in the air inside a pillar of light while the wind blows their hair around? Can a person not shoot an arrow without a giant glowing rune appearing behind them? Can a ninja not hit a man with a giant serrated edged broadsword without it looking like a fireworks factory caught fire during a landslide?
I love things that glow. I love things that sparkle. I love neon-colored stuff in general. But when I was growing up, these things meant something. It meant that you were pulling out the BIG GUNS. The glowing sword was the one that was going to KICK ASS. Games today add extra glow-trail effects to lightsabers. They’re LIGHTSABERS. They are already glowing. That is what makes them cool. You don’t have to add explosions. Make them cut something in half and make the wounds glow. That would be cool.
Why is everything so amped up? In videogames, I can see a need for this back in the days when graphics weren’t as detailed and you couldn’t really tell what was going on. In comics, you sometimes need motion lines and starburst effects to indicate motion or impact. We live in the year 2010. We don’t have flying cars yet, but we do have the ability to animate characters in such a way that I can tell when they’ve been hit with a spear without the use of a solar flare to track the weapon’s movements. Don’t believe me? Look at Heavy Rain. There are fights in that game that last several minutes and you never get bored. Exciting, grueling, viscerally interesting fights. Nothing glows, nobody reaches POWER LEVEL TEN THOUSAND OMG, nobody shoots a fireball at another person. There is no excess – there is simply good cinematography and the right cues (visual and otherwise) to engage the player. Admittedly, few games are done in the style of Heavy Rain, but its lessons can be applied to other formats.
Here’s the thing. There’s a reason they call them “special effects”. If every effect is special, then none are. They don’t make an impact anymore. It says a lot to me that the game with the fight scenes that really sticks out in my mind is the “plain” one. It also gives me the least indigestion. Now get the hell off my lawn.
The Soft Landing: Pax East Highlights
I’m baaaack! Did you see that new banner? Isn’t it awesome? My friend Eric Maziade redesigned it using the best elements of past banners, making it fit with the color scheme of the blog’s new home. Thanks man!
Here’s a quick recap, Pros/Cons style.
Pros
Thursday Night Paradise
Our arrival at Boston was made of incredible. We discovered an awesome Burger Pub, where I promptly managed to spill a beer on myself… twice. And yet, at the same time, I managed to strangely endear myself to the very cute waitress (“Hey, I like drunk you”).
The meet-up and play event we organized in the Sheraton lobby (there was this big ass glass table big enough for 4 board games) was one of the highlights of the con. A bunch of strangers instantly connecting and having fun is what makes gaming so damn cool.
Pandemic, Battlestar Galactica, Bang, Fluxx and other many others were played.
As the evening wore on and my friends retired for bed at 11ish (a mistake they swore never to repeat), I was pointed out to by a kind reader that Wil Wheaton was having dinner with a small group at the bar near our gaming area. Transgressing a few rules of social etiquette, I approached him gently, crouched so we’d be eye to eye (I hate having people look up when we first meet ) and introduced myself.
Some very friendly banter occurred for the next few minutes about my blog (we both like each other’s writing, yay!), D&D and D&D geeks. He even introduced his wife and a couple of his friends. I was trying very hard to keep it together while at the same time totally relating to the guy (we’re the same age). He was a complete class act and even laughed at my dumb Phil jokes (my friends know what that means).
Wil, I apologize for crashing your dinner and thanks for being such a good sport about it. Next time I’ll air high-five you from a safe distance. 
Ohhh and that keynote… dude, made of awesome. I can assure you that the relative calm of the audience in the middle was not because of any drag, it was pure trance-like attention. You told us our own stories in ways most, if not all of us couldn’t have expressed so eloquently. Thanks man.
D&D with the Boys
On Friday night, I got to DM my Challenge adventure to my friends Dave: The Game and E (you know from here and here) and the Wizards of the Coast D&D crowd. Chief among them were Chris (The guy in charge of organized play), Trevor (Community Manager), Greg (Editor and Designer) and Logan (freelance designer and writer). We had an awesome roleplaying intro with many improv moments and played out the first 2 encounters, a trapped door/skill challenge and a combat. I got great feedback from it that I used in the DM challenge the next day.
The DM Challenge
With a table-full of 6 players featuring 4 Chatty DM readers, we had a LOT of fun. The adventure was complex and the second encounter (the temple’s entry guardians) was BRUTAL. We had so many funny roleplaying/exploration/combat elements in this adventure that I plan to write a short series of game reports featuring what I recall from both groups playing through it.
But here’s a quick bullet point rundown:
Game 1
- PCs intimidate insane Gnome Bling-Wizard to perform CSI analysis of corrupted water sample in his laboratory.
- Ardant PC passing as a Doomdreamer cause elementalist scholar to fawn like a fanboi, giving quest away sans skill roll.
- Shardmind Psion blows Arcane Lock/Glyph of Warding skill challenge and gets sucked in a room full of Icy Spray Wraiths (and a Ghostskull)… and survives.
Game 2
- Shardmind broadcasting telepathic ‘request info about elementalists’ announcements causes panic in college plaza.
- Shardmind, when asked to identify himself, telepathically data dumps his entire life since birth in one long string.
- Mort the Ghostskull/Brain in a Jar trying to use loop holes in his ‘eternal undead guardian curse’ to have PCs free him.
- PCs fumbling the religion check needed to free Mort from the clutches of the Elder Elemental Eye while he’s slowly dissolving in a pool of acid… then dropping ritual book in said acid pool…
- As it dissolves, Mort’s undead brain tries to take over Shardmind only to realize: “Where the F..K is the brain?” before being absorbed back into the shard’s thought matrix.
- Spurt the Silvered Bulette… with crazy skill challenge.
Chatty DM (Going on and on about how cool and dangerous the bulette is): Hmm, am I overdoing it?
Players: Yes Chatty, we know how badass your Bulette is.
Chatty DM: Come on guys! This monster is SO badass that it eats Space and Time and craps black holes!
Good times.
Oh and incidentally, our very own Dave won the challenge. Congrats friend, I shall have my revenge and I will NOT advertise my presence so publicly next time. I bow down to your skill in grace and humility… even if you used cheap parlour tricks like plunking an awesome Dwarven Forge set for the final encounter.
I love you man.
Burning Luke and his Wheel of Awesome
On Saturday, while running around like a headless hen trying to fight windmills, I bumped into Luke Crane (creator of the Burning Wheel Roleplaying game) which I like to consider is a good gamer friend. I couldn’t chat with him much but asked him if he’d run a demo for my friends at an unspecified time to which he graciously acquiesced.
We managed to catch up on Sunday and played a 60 minute session of Burning Wheel’s “‘The Sword” where 4 shady characters with the moral fiber of recycled toilet paper fight over the ownership of an enchanted sword found at the bottom of a dungeon. It was phenomenally fun and Luke remains one of the few paragons of GMing I’ve met, representing the next level of standards and skills I aim for (another blog post or two just there).
(Yeah, I’m a D&D 4e blogger/freelance designer AND a Crane/BW fan AND an Old School gamer… Call it Full-Spectrum gaming, the best of all worlds if you ask me, you should try it).
Microsoft Surface D&D 4e Demo
Just too cool for words. Way more intuitive than the You Tube demo makes it out to be (I was manipulating the thing like Tom Cruise in Minority Report within minutes), fun and fast.
Unstable a bit… but then again, it is Microsoft-based.
The Tauntaun Sleeping Bag
My dearest E brought me a most amazing Tauntaun sleeping bag to give to my kids. While it was somewhat of a pain to carry around, it got me a TON of thumbs up and ‘man this is so cool’ comments. Gamer geeks are the best. Thanks sis, they love it!
Cons
The Participants to Events Ratio
At 30 000 participants per day and only a few score events everyday, it became very hard to participate in planned events at the con. On Saturday, I felt that all I did was wait, walk, wait some more and eat. Fortunately, things always livened up at night. Getting people organized to do things on a specific schedule is like trying to draw water with a pasta sieve. So much so that my inner leader/investigator was brought close to the breaking point a few times when shit didn’t happen fast enough around me.
That could have cost me dearly if my close entourage didn’t know me so well. Thanks guys.
The DM Challenge
(Fair warning, I switched brain-sides when I wrote that part)
This is a tad bit more touchy because I do NOT want to raise a stink. An organizational snafu happened with the DM Challenge when they announced, a few weeks ago, that people could register to play with a specific DM. Given my status as the ChattyDM and the advertising I did on the blog and on Twitter, I landed 4 readers who asked to play with me (out of a total of 6). The Wizards people realized (as I did) that this was a huge conflict of interest.
I had hoped that something was planned to deal with that but that wasn’t the case. Upon realization of the situation, the event organizer had to make a snap decision and he offered me 2 choices: I could take the players and forfeit any claim to the challenge or the players could be sent to other tables and I’d be able to run the challenge as intended.
I was really torn (and disappointed, in a day that had had its shares of frustrations). First because I had worked very hard at creating this adventure and I was looking forward to the actual competition. Second, especially because my frustration was mostly based on having spent a large part the day not being able to do what I planned to, I knew how disappointed those 4 guys would be if they didn’t get to play with me.
I finally went for playing with the players, following deeper instincts than my emotional state. Wil said that gaming creates lasting friendships and this very game may lead to just that, based on the awesome legendary stories we shared together…
I mean, come on, a data dumping shardmind? A Silvered Bulette that poops black holes? A brain that melts in a pool of acid because of a roll of 1 on an untrained religion check? That’s freaking priceless!
In the end, I was rewarded with an awesome game, great feedback and a lot of unexpected swag. Dave was a prince among men by sharing part of the prize packet with me (Hammerfast FTW) and the event organizer gave me a copy of the new Three-Dragon Ante and some more goodies!
And it makes me sound all badass when I tell people that I got disqualified from a D&D DMing contest.
So, what of next year? Well, Tycho says that it will be better and sleeker and more awesome. I’ve learned what Pax is and next year I shall be there, with friends, old and new, sitting in the queue room, playing Jungle Speed.
I shall learn to be the willow to the gales of awesomeness blowing out of that place. I have one year starting now.
Mailbag Memo
Please don’t hesitate to send me email or leave a comment about questions you have. (If you send an email, be sure to put Sims CH Mailing in the subject line.) I’m willing to answer just about anything I legally and conscionably can about games, the industry, freelancing, and working professionally at Wizards of the Coast. I’ll share opinions and facts, as well as how I’d run my game or recommend you solve a problem you have. I have a few questions already, but more is better. Don’t be shy just because I’m a cannibalistic demihuman. (I do bite.) Go ahead, email me. I dare you.
Critical Bits for the week ending 2010-03-28
- RT @wordwill: ALIEN SURVIVOR, in the vein of LADY BLACKBIRD, is here: http://bit.ly/ab0T2R #
- RT @SlyFlourish: I wrote an article on fun terrain effects and PC terrain powers with the Harrowing Halls tiles! #dnd http://goo.gl/fb/pj7k #
- 4e rules for all you couples out there. RT @pvponline: Details are shared in today's PvP. http://is.gd/aTjXV #
- RT @BoingBoing: YouDunnit: a game that travels backwards in time http://bit.ly/cF7FTg #
- RT @jachilli: New blog: Solo 4e CampaignPlans http://bit.ly/9fShTw #
- RT @SlyFlourish: Cool looking web-based DM tracker that imports from iPlay4e: http://laughterforever.com/inCombat/ #
- RT @KoboldQuarterly: The disjunction decay is here, a #4E #dnd Hazard… http://cot.ag/cYRF58 #
- RT @radiomaru: i guess i should tweet this scott pilgrim movie trailer http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/scottpilgrimvstheworld/ #
- RT @gamefiend: Introducing Psionics into your 4e game: http://bit.ly/btpo0E I'd love to see some other justifications for psionics would be. #
- Check out the full list of Origins Awards nominees here: http://bit.ly/adbEdx (via @catalystgamelab) #
Review: SmallWorld
I recently had the opportunity to play a board game called SmallWorld. The premise of SmallWorld is pretty simple: there are a lot of different fantastical creatures trying to live in a world that is much too small to accomodate them all. The object of the game is to open up lines of communication and start think-tanks in order to figure out how to best use this world’s scarce resources to best benefit society as a whole – all races living together peacefully as children of a common world.
KIDDING! They all try to kill each other.
Breakin’ Up
In SmallWorld, everybody starts off playing one of the aforementioned races of fantastical beings. The game board is divided up into regions that everybody fights over, much like Risk. That’s pretty much where the similarities end. In Risk, you try to multiply and take over the world. That would really be nice in SmallWorld, except most of the time you never get more units for your race. Instead, you do as best you can with your race, until it starts to become apparent that this just isn’t going to work much longer. Then you do the unthinkable:
You break up with them, and start going out with another race.
That’s right, you’re not stuck playing for one team in SmallWorld. You can ditch your current race (referred to in-game as “going into decline”), and pick a new one and start fresh. You may be wondering at this point how one wins a game of SmallWorld. Well, technically the only team you play for is yourself, and you get Victory Coins for the number of territories you currently control at the end of your turn (among other things). Like any good failed relationship, they stick around for awhile. Except, instead of driving you crazy and leaving psychotic notes on your car, they don’t do anything aside from sit there and you continue to get Victory Coins for the territories your ex-race still occupies. When you inevitably decide that your new civilization-fling is getting too emotionally needy, you can break up with this one too. Unlike real life, though, you can only have one ex at a time, and they don’t form a facebook group all about how you’re a heartless bastard who only wants one thing (even though you do – Victory Coins!).
Just as psychotic ex-girlfriends are all uniquely terrifying in their own way, each race in SmallWorld is different as well. For instance, the mythical race known as “Humans” gets +1 Victory Coin for every region of farmland you occupy at the end of the turn. Skeletons, on the other hand, get to increase their numbers by 1 for every 2 regions they take over. Ghouls are particularly terrifying, because even when they’re in decline, they can still go around and conquer stuff just like your active race.
If that wasn’t interesting enough for you, each race has a randomly determined superpower. These work just like the powers of each race, but now you wind up with different combinations every game, keeping everything fresh. Each race has a token detailing its power, and the add-on power fits on to the left side of it, so you wind up with things like “Commando Amazons” and “Flying Orcs”. In addition to making the game more fun, these combinations are immensely enjoyable to say out loud.
Heloise’s Hints For The Thrifty Commando Amazon
While the “declining civilizations” game mechanic is interesting by itself, the combinations of the races and power are really what make this game sing. It’s clear that game balance was a priority in the creation of SmallWorld, and the fact that some of these powers and races are better in many instances than others was taken into account. These imbalances were dealt with by marking each race and power with a number of tiles to give out when this combination is chosen, adding the two together to get the total number the player receives. For instance, Dwarves have a cool power and don’t get a terribly large amount of troops, but Ratmen (which do NOTHING aside from eating cheese and killing things, I guess) get over twice as many.
Adding even further to the strategy, players are not just randomly assigned a power and race. Initially, they are chosen (person with the pointiest ears goes first), but thereafter players must purchase new races with their Victory Coins. The mechanic is handled in such a way that race/power combinations nobody has chosen the last couple of times give the player who chooses this “undesirable” option a financial incentive for doing so, and picking a new and powerful combo that just appeared will make the player pay some VC’s to take the opportunity.
In truth, I didn’t much care for SmallWorld the first time I played. I was expecting Risk. Once I understood that picking smart race/power combos and knowing when to decline were much better strategies than running my poor Berserker Ghouls into the ground, I started to have a lot more fun. The only other complaint I have is that the art on the tiles is visually confusing to me. Each race has a different color, which is usually the only thing that saves me because the beautiful art for each race has been scaled down to the point where I have to squint at it to figure out what race it is. It’s worse when a race goes into decline, as everybody is a different shade of grey with a greyscale version of a hard-to-see icon. The Giants, in particular, look like a bunch of knees and some tree bark to me when shrunk to icon-size. Don’t get me wrong, though, these are really minor complaints and the game kicks butt.
Should You Spend Your Victory Coins?
In short, I wholeheartedly recommend picking up a copy of this and killing your whole family and all of your friends. Make sure you play the game with them first, though, because then you’ll probably have to run from the police from now until Gen Con to find someone to play with.
The Melias Prophecy
Kelliha
Confusing Heralds
Prophecies and predictions can play a large part in any RPG campaign. Cryptic messages and foreboding tales can herald apocalyptic destruction or miraculous saviours. The kingdom of Melias worships one such insightful text and after generations of zealous worship, the time for prosperous glory has almost arrived for the people of this kingdom. As the people of Melias wage war with the nomadic tribes of Orcs that infest their homeland, they place their hope and faith in the hands of a young king, heralded as the Kelliha, bringer of glory. Unfortunately one of the kingdoms sages has stumbled upon a cipher that shows the Melias Prophecy in new and devastating light. The Melias Prophecy speaks not of the human kingdom, but of the Orc hordes that plague the lands. Now great heroes from across the world are being summoned to stop the prophecy coming to pass. Below is the description of Kingdom of Melias and their hidden peril as well as the Orcs who opposes them; Players who discover the truth should be faced with a tough decision. Protect the humans or allow the prophecy to pass, granting the Orcs a peaceful nation of their own.
The Kingdom of Prophecy
The zealous kingdom of Melias has ruled over their lands with an iron fist for generations. Laying claim that their strict laws and beliefs guide them through the Melias Prophecy. The scripture, which by law must be present in every home, tavern and shop, has been used as a guideline for the kingdoms actions throughout the many years it has ruled the land. The expulsion and subsequent wars with the elves and dwarves native to the area was deciphered as part of the ‘Purge of the Impure.’ The passage of ‘Broken Tools’ outlaws all weapons and tools within the kingdom for four weeks every year. Each law and festival within the lands of Melias has been carefully withdrawn and deciphered from the ancient and worshipped prophecy. With the most important festival happening once every ten years with the appearance of the ‘Fire Moon’. During the three nights that the ‘Fire Moon’ appears in the night sky, a child of fiery eyes shall be born, heralding the beginning of a grand future for the people of the human kingdom. This child shall be the Kelliha and lead the chosen through a reign of insurmountable prosperity. Eight years ago the Kelliha was born and celebration gripped the kingdom for five years, as was written. Now the child king has been crowned and leads his army on the final chapter of the prophecy, ‘The Cleansing’. The armies of Melias have embarked upon a crusade to rid the land of all evil. Once this bloody crusade is completed the kingdom shall live in a land of eternal beauty and opulence. As is foretold, so shall it pass. [Read the rest of this article]
My Love Affair With Tron
I grew up with the movie Tron. Okay, I’ll admit that I grew up with a lot of movies, but there is a shorter list of movies that I watched at least once a year for my entire life up to the age of 18. Tron is most certainly on that list, along with Aliens, Predator, True Lies, and Big Trouble in Little China. Tron, however, is a unique movie in the sense that if someone tells me they like the movie I can that I could be friends with them instantly. With such a strong weight on the movie’s shoulders, being the apparent cornerstone of my entire social life, it’s a good thing that a small percentage of people have seen the film (or will openly admit to it).
As proof, I give you this excellent quote from The Simpsons:
Homer Simpson (in the 3rd Dimension): Did anyone see the movie Tron?
Hibbert: No.
Lisa: No.
Marge: No.
Wiggum: No.
Bart: No.
Patty: No.
Wiggum: No.
Ned: No.
Selma: No.
Frink: No.
Lovejoy: No.
Wiggum: Yes. I mean… um, I mean, no. No, heh.
A few years back the Tron franchise re-appeared seemingly out of the blue with the video game Tron 2.0, which finally allowed us to explore the ‘inside of a computer’ world of Tron in first person. Fast forward to 2010, this year, and Jeff Bridges is not only an academy award winning actor but also starring in the upcoming film Tron Legacy. The movie is set to release in December of this year, and it looks like it will be exactly what you expect from a modern day adaptation of an early-80′s movie franchise. Okay, maybe that’s not the best set up but think about the first Transformers movie and then imagine how awesome this movie could be. [Read the rest of this article]
Emergence & Reentry
Emergence
Hello everyone! I’m Chris Sims, former Wizards of the Coast designer and editor. You might know me from my editing work on the 3e D&D game (Rules Compendium), my design work for the 4e game (Martial Power, Monster Manual, Monster Manual 2, and so on), or from D&D Insider. I’m joining my friends here at Critical-Hits, because I enjoy talking, thinking, and writing about games and generally geeky stuff.
I want to write what you want to read. That means I’m open to questions and topic suggestions. Feel free to send me either or both at my Critical Hits email–chris at critcal-hits dot com. Also, I want to start helping you with your games and design questions, which might even form a whole new “mailbag” column if it receives enough response.
I also want to to play the “identify the classic AD&D monster and source” with my author bio. You identify it first, and I’ll tell everybody you did. I’ll try to change up once a week.
Reentry
I’ve been thinking about entry-level tabletop roleplaying games a lot lately. Looking back on the start of the 4e D&D game, and the amount of material that’s already out for it, I wish it had been developed and released in a more controlled manner.
I realize that the 4e game isn’t really entry-level. However, it was produced with the intent of gaining a whole sector of new players. It failed to be as good as it could have been in that area of design intent.
An entry-level game must give the potential player setting and rules material that are comprehended quickly and easily. The player needs some control of character creation and play through choices. But an entry-level game needs to limit choices to the point that they’re digestible.
By limiting choices, I don’t mean eliminating choices by making character creation extremely random. Randomness isn’t simplicity; it’s choices made for you by a roll of the dice. Numerous modern video roleplaying games allow a lot of choice during character creation without resorting to such a crutch. A modern entry-level product has to acknowledge that. Random systems all too often force a character into particular molds, limited by the designer’s imagination and page space. Such a lack of choice won’t fly with most modern gamers.
Numerous modern tabletop roleplaying games, and even more video game RPGs, instead provide ideal starting points for a player in the form of archetypes. You want a troll mage? Here’s the perfect set of initial abilities for that character. (Even the 4e D&D game has such archetypes for a starting character, but the information is easily overlooked in each character class entry.) The good modern games allow you to tinker with and eventually outgrow the archetypes as you grow in play proficiency. They do it without overwhelming you.
Speaking of overwhelming, the 4e D&D game had a cumbersome amount of legacy material and audience expectations. These pressures didn’t serve the design process as well as they could have. It seemed to me that the possible forms the game could have taken overwhelmed even the designers themselves. A 4e that took a few more of its cues from the old-school red-box (Moldvay 1981 revision) D&D Basic Set might have been better in the end.
For character creation and development, that game had several classes, a little randomness, and limited scope. It also had a range of information that at least implied a setting, as well as enough challenges and rewards to get one started as a DM. Sure, looking at it with modern sensibilities makes its flaws even more glaring. At the time, though, that red box had an approach that was sheer genius–simple, limited, and modularly expandable.
The tendency today is to try to give players everything possible at once, maybe even with a little new hotness for spice. That’s a wrongheaded approach, especially given the evidence of how people digest and play with tabletop roleplaying game material (slowly). It’s also wrongheaded approach if you, as a designer, want the game to have a long, exciting lifespan.
Too many players think that a new version of a game needs, at its inception, all the options the previous, mature system had. They’re wrongheaded, too. The way people learn and play a new system (slowly) doesn’t bear out this desire to have it all as soon as possible. It’s also wrongheaded if you, as a player, want the game to have a long, exciting lifespan.
Imagine if we could roll back time to the initial release of the 4e D&D game. What if the first Player’s Handbook had, at most, 160 pages–about the size of Martial Power and similar books. Let’s say it had the expected races (dwarf, elf, half-elf, halfling, and human) four core classes (cleric, fighter, rogue, wizard), levels 1–10. It’d also have all the rules the current PH1 has, along with some clearer “entry-level” stuff such as archetypes. (All this would indeed fit in a 160-page book, along with a little new hotness, such as a new race or three and maybe another class–to taste.)
Before you decry or support this utter fantasy, imagine also that the release schedule modularly expanded the game. Six months would give you, as a player, a few more builds, classes, and races. A year later, at most, you would have access to the first paragon tier material. Year two would show you epic tier in all its glory. (The fact is, though, most current 4e players aren’t yet beyond heroic tier, even now.)
It would have been better for the designers and for the players. And that’s not even mentioning a utilitarian release schedule for DM products. It’s also ignoring that an entry-level game also has to be simple and fun, which I think 4e is. But that, and perhaps expansion on some of the topics touched on here, is a topic for another day.
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