Keep Calm And WIS Check (DC 22)
Remember a couple weeks ago when nobody knew anything at all about the new D&D? Then came DDXP, and a couple things happened. One, a playtest that lots of people took part in and nobody can talk about due to NDAs. Two, a series of seminars that were very light on details and heavy on “big picture” stuff like “wanting to make a D&D game that you can play the way you want”. Nobody who knows anything is supposed to discuss details, but the thing a lot of people are missing is that most of the details are not simply hidden.
Lots of videogames in our modern Internets-enabled future world release beta versions of their games. World of Warcraft has their Public Test Realms (PTRs) for players to view and help test upcoming content. The game developer gets a bunch of free testers and data, and the fans get to try stuff out early. The R&D team at WotC is being all crazy and smart and doing their own playtests and asking us what we want from this thing before they build it. A lot of the puzzle pieces don’t even exist yet, and the ones that do could very likely be very different by release time.
At this point in the game, you should automatically assume anybody on the Internets aside from the people designing the game have no idea what they’re talking about. That being said, I think the modular approach that’s been talked about so much recently is showing its strength here. One of the things repeatedly mentioned at DDXP this year is a very light and flexible core set of rules, and a version of those was what we got to play.
I’m a programmer by trade, and this is consistent with what I’d do if I had a big project that needed to do a whole bunch of things. I wouldn’t start off by implementing functionality for everything it needs to eventually do. I’d start by building a base that only does the things nearly every piece will need, and I’d test it very thoroughly and get it as right as I can before doing anything else, maybe rewriting whole sections of the code if I had to. I have no way of knowing for sure, but my guess is we’re at that stage right now.
The unfortunate thing is that the core rules are in a state where they don’t feel unfinished when you play the game. It just felt like playing D&D. Right now, though, is not the time to worry about all the things we don’t know and remember instead what we do — that the system isn’t going to be ready for prime time for quite awhile.
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The NDA
At DDXP, the R&D team seemed absolutely genuine in their desire to give us all the game we want, and to get our input to do just that. One thing I don’t think a lot people understand quite yet is that they need a way to channel and distill our hopes and wishes for the new edition into a form more comprehensible than the Internet Firehose. Though I don’t know exactly how getting input from us is going to work, I’m pretty sure they will let us know the ways they’d like to receive it. We already have frequent polls from Monte Cook’s Legends & Lore column, and I’d imagine playtesting is going to be a huge part of this as well.
When I first went under NDA to do playtesting last year, I asked what I could talk about and what I couldn’t. I was, as bloggers are wont to do, trying to determine the maximum amount of stuff I could safely share with the world. I was told that I could say I was playtesting something as long as it had been announced, but that I shouldn’t divulge details.
This is an extra special kind of frustrating for us bloggery types. We are pretty much in a constant state of excitement and wanting to tell people about everything, and we have to be careful about what we discuss. Yes, there’s the NDA stopping us from spilling all the beans, but it’s more than that. It’s so tempting to speculate my little heart out, but all we wind up doing in these kinds of situations is giving people a tiny bit of context that spawns a stirge’s nest on a forum somewhere. We frequently tend to approach things as if we were going to review them, but it’s kind of like talking about how delicious the Thanksgiving turkey is when it’s halfway cooked. You’ll probably get salmonella, and then everybody else will think salmonella is a feature of D&D Next. (I can neither confirm nor deny if it is.)
In a weird way, I think the NDA saves us from ourselves. People are already pretty worked up about D&D Next only knowing a few crumbs of information that may even be out-of-date by the time of this writing. Imagine if we could all nitpick every little detail from afar up until the game’s release. It wouldn’t be pretty.
My function as a blogger, as I see it, is to bring gamers together. We do a lot of D&D coverage here at Critical Hits, but a large amount of what we do here is focused around making it easier for people to have a good time. Gaming has been a huge positive force in my life for a very long time, and I want to preserve that. That’s why I took this gig. However, it’s been my experience (especially since starting here) that stirring the pot — just getting people worked up about nothing — frequently does the opposite.
Keep Calm And Carry On
The thing I keep worrying about is that WotC is setting out to unify the editions this time out. They’re going to find out what we want and bring everybody back into the fold. We are an extremely opinionated audience with a very wide variety of tastes that we have a tendency to fight over. What happens if they can’t do this because we won’t let them?
In my mind, there’s a few things we as a community need to do while the next D&D is being developed. We need to play by the rules, and we really need to relax.
Nothing about the new D&D gives me more hope than the fact we’re seeing playtests this early. Stuff people hate will be addressed and fixed long before release, and the things people want have plenty of time to make it in. It gives me the same feeling I get when I’ve had time to really do a project right, saving myself a ton of headaches down the road.
This is an opportunity for us to be heard, so let’s make it count.
Image courtesy: http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/
Exploring D&D at DDXP
With the D&D Experience (DDXP) and the first public play of the new D&D rapidly fading away in the rear-view mirror, I have reams of topics I want to discuss. And, of course, 99% of them are in one way or another protected by the NDA that all participants signed. The open playtest announced by Wizards of the Coast is on the horizon though, and then informed discussion is going to pick up dramatically. Until then, there are still aspects of D&D that we can still explore with an eye toward the future.
What I learned—listening to the seminars, playing and DMing, and just sitting and talking with all sorts of people—is that for me the best part of gaming (and the best part of life) is the exploration. During one of the seminars, the D&D Next design team talked about the three pillars of the game: combat, roleplaying, and exploration. I had been thinking about the game in similar terms since the new iteration of D&D was announced, but I never broke it down into that precise configuration. When I started thinking about it in those terms, I realized what I had missed most from my D&D play experience since Second Edition: exploration. But it wasn’t really just about a single form of exploration: the one most commonly associated with the phrase “exploration” is when the players delve into a strange dungeon and draw a map as they go. But there are countless forms of exploration in the game, and the sense of wonder that each form of exploration provides can build a multi-layered experience, taking a roleplaying game from good to great. But I will come back to exploration later.
A Little Bit of DDXP
Some parts of the D&D Experience I can talk about. The most important and exciting of those topics is not necessarily the game itself, but the gamers. I know I’ve probably said this before, but I am nothing if not redundant: I love gamers. Sure, some of us are tools—or can exhibit tool-itude when certain events align, like when we are conscious and in front of a keyboard. But for the most part, everyone I played with was in the “non-tool gamer” category. Everyone was excited to talk about the new rules and the feel of the game during the D&D sessions, but everyone also rolled some dice, acted a little goofy, and contributed to a fun story experience for everyone else at the table. When managed properly by the DM, each player’s exploration of the game and his/her own character’s exploration of the game world adds to the story and the fun.
The convention and the exploration started for me before I even arrived at DDXP, as I shared the six-hour ride from my place to Fort Wayne with fellow Critical-Hitter Phil “ChattyDM” Ménard. I had met him only once, at this past GenCon for a total of 90 seconds. Within an hour we were in tears of laughter, sharing thoughts and ideas about game design, life, and the joys of a single store that can offer the best of America: pepper spray, stun guns, and sugar-free fudge. (The difference among the three? Stun guns don’t leave you retching and gagging while it incapacitates you!) Also, from this moment forward the “orc and pie” trope shall be known in my games as the “orc and wedding cake.”
After a fun first game of 4e D&D in the Ashes of Athas campaign with my fellow members of the Ravenous Halfling Horde (“Halflings always tell the truth because their bodies are too small to contain lies”), it was exploring all of the editions of D&D all the time.
A Great Deal of Exploration
Based on my experiences with previous editions, I wanted to look at how exploration has been a part of the game throughout its history. At DDXP I made a point to ask people about their experiences with the versions of D&D that they have played, and how they interacted with the rules in their games. Talking to people who played before the release of Third Edition (and especially those who played AD&D and those various editions that preceded it or ran parallel to it), a common thread ran throughout their experiences. They admitted happily that they really didn’t know or understand the rules when they first started playing, but that didn’t stop them or their groups from having vast amounts of fun. Even those who did strive for a full understanding of the rules confessed to changing or ignoring large parts of the rules sets. These changes were generally done by consensus between the DM and the players, striving to make the game more appropriate to the wishes of all involved.
This, I realized, is really an exploration. It is an exploration of not just the rules, but more importantly an exploration of the relationship between the DM and players, and a mutual pact to address the goals and desires of each party. At times this exploration leads to the premature end of a game or campaign, and the lack of a well-developed and balanced rules set in those early editions contributed to the problem. But paradoxically, the need to “fix” certain rules encouraged communication, which helped the parties in this game of storytelling form a stronger bond.
Other types of exploration are important to the game. Most campaigns I have run over the years began on a mostly blank map of a home-brewed game world. The characters start in a rather small and isolated part of the world, and the best they have is rumors of other nations, second-hand information on what the capital city is like, a fleeting memory of the one time the princess of their kingdom took a tour of their small town, etc. Their adventures see them exploring not just dark groves and dangerous caves, but the world at large. Like a dungeon map, the world map is expanded only as the PCs move upon it. This is exploration of the game world, and it spurs the characters to succeed in their current location, with the hopes of getting a chance to succeed at the next one. I have never enjoyed much, as a player or a DM, knowing everything about the game world from the start of the campaign. I want the map to expand at the same speed as the story. The exploration of the world becomes part of the game.
I’ve always felt the same way about a different form of exploration: the exploration of the rules. Some knowledge of the rules that are coming is obviously unavoidable and sometimes important. However, even during Third and Fourth Edition, I wanted my character to change and grow with the story. I didn’t want to know the exact path my character would take from level 1 through level 20, pre-selecting each feat or skill or power choice. I understand that some people like this, and I do not begrudge them that desire. In essence, that is their own form of exploration, and while it focuses on a different part of the game, it is still a part of the game for them.
A Game with No Limits
In every edition I have ever played, my favorite phrase as a DM is “don’t look at your sheet, but tell me what you want your character to do.” For players who only took part in later editions, that is sometimes a very difficult concept to wrap one’s mind around. The more detailed and codified the rules become, the greater tunnel-vision one might get on the character sheet or on the battlemat. Clinging to the letter of the rules code is totally understandable, especially if one is punished by a DM (or yelled at by other players) for not doing so. I have had to bite my tongue (not easy for me at times) when a new player wanted to do something cool like have his fighter roll a barrel at oncoming foes, only to be told dismissively by the DM or other players, “Just take a regular attack with your javelin. It’s right there on your sheet.” What a moment of potential exploration lost!
Exploring the interaction with the environment, exploring how the rules cover certain situations, and exploring a fun, imaginative solution to a problem should never be dismissed so easily. Even if the solution is ridiculous or wrong-headed, there is the potential for a good DM and willing players to discuss the situation and form an imaginative and relevant consequence. What separates a good RPG from a board game is the ability to do anything, even things not written in the rules (or on character sheets).
Somewhere between the exploration of rules and the exploration of the game world is a middle ground where, for me, the crux of the game lies. When I play, I try to keep my focus (and my mind’s eye) squarely on the exploration of what my character’s life and experiences are like—put most simply, it is an exploration of an adventurer’s life. This is what each edition seems to have moved further away from, until it is almost hand-waved. I understand that some people do not want to deal with the minutiae of tracking every copper piece and every bolt shot from a crossbow. I respect that. But I also want a game where interaction with the environment is important, whether that environment be a monster-filled dungeon or a town full of merchants. I want to avoid using the term “simulationist,” because I do not want rules that attempt to simulate how every single element of the game world works. But I want the game to simulate how my fantasy character lives her life.
Where From Here?
When asked what my favorite D&D editions were, I answered AD&D (First Edition) and Fourth Edition. I like the way the former encouraged the forms of exploration that entertained and challenged me. And I like the way the latter expanded the utility of the classes, so that none were necessarily pigeon-holed as only effective in combat or only effective in certain situations outside of combat. If the new D&D is going to meet the goals of the designers and the wishes of the players, it is going to have to support both the very freeform game where the game takes place in the players’ minds as much as on the gaming table and the character sheets. It is also going to have to appeal to those who wish only to explore feat trees, power cards, and five-foot squares. I think the design team knows this. I believe they are working in the right direction.
The D&D fans who anxiously wait for the open playtest also have to understand that we are in the first step of a very long and complicated process. To make a judgment on D&D at this point is like saying a cake’s frosting is horrible when there is only eggs and flour in a bowl—and those eggs might not even be eggs. What the design team is currently trying to determine is how to make the flour, the base of the cake. We are all going to get our chance to taste the cake batter, and the flavorings, and the icing, and the toppings. We will get there. Keep it in perspective. Keep talking about what you like in a cake, because in the end we are going to be making the various recipes that the designers must work toward.
Review: “Alloy of Law”
Previously I’ve talked about my previous novel attempts, difficult revisions and cutting, actually getting work done, and reviewed Low Town.
Background
After his excellent Mistborn trilogy and being tapped to finish The Wheel of Time. Brandon Sanderson has risen swiftly through the ranks of fantasy authors. Personally, Mistborn is my favorite series of all time. When I found out that a new novel set in the same universe was coming out, I was excited. The magic in the world revolves around using metals to have significant, but limited, magical effects. Whereas the first novel took place in a fantasy dystopia with apocalyptic rumblings, this novels problems are decidedly more limited in scope.
Setting
With the same magic system firmly in place, Sanderson moves out of medieval stasis into a Wild West/ Industrial Revolution era in a novel that smartly extrapolates a world’s progression even if it fails to capture the grand scope of the original. Alloy of Law starts in the Wild West (called the Roughs), but spends most of the time in a bustling metropolis. Although Sanderson’s new characters lack the variety of powers found in the first trilogy, he uses his magic system adroitly to come up with formidable (and interesting) twists on what existed in his original Mistborn trilogy. Coupled with very cool newsprint/dime store inserts between some chapters, the setting is one that easy to enjoy. [Read the rest of this article]
Dwarven SEAL Team Neutralizes Terrorist DM Threat: Film At 11
Yesterday, I returned from four days worth of DDXP 2012. As always, I return with many treasured memories. I got to rub elbows with lots of game designers, bloggers, and other cool people. I got to play some great games and playtest the new D&D. I even had the honor of being Patient Zero for the official con crud of DDXP 2012. The thing I’ll remember most, though, was running a table for the Battle Interactive on Saturday night.
Behind The Screen For Perfect Strangers
As some of you who read my column already know, I’m not big on 4e combat. The decision to run some games at DDXP was born from a strange mixture of wanting to help out and curiosity about what it would be like to run a table full of strangers who weren’t used to my crap. The idea didn’t scare me too bad at first. I couldn’t be worse than some of the judges I’d had at these things, I rationalized. I didn’t realize the idea made me anxious until it was far too late. I was to run my first game on Friday morning, and I was nervous enough about it by that point that I wanted out. I wasn’t about to shirk my duties, though. I familiarized myself with the module I was supposed to run the night before, and I reported to the marshaling area at 8am sharp as ordered.
It was about then one of the staff came around and said they needed another warm body for another table. I quickly volunteered, thinking this meant the table needed another player, and I would be able to get out of running the game. On the way to the table, I asked if I needed to go roll up a character. “No,” the staffer said. “You’re running.” No worse off than before, I smiled and reported to my table. They provided me with a printed copy of the module, but I brought the module up on my laptop anyway so I could see the monster stat blocks. I started to get confused, as the pages weren’t matching up between the paper and digital versions. Suddenly, it hit me.
This was a different module. I’d just volunteered to run a game completely cold.
Pelor’s Peg-Leg Protection Protocol
It drives me insane that it’s 2012 and modern awesome digital roleplaying materials aren’t commonplace. I get nerd-rabies just thinking about it.
Please allow me a few moments to beat a long-dead horse: people pirate D&D books all the time, and WotC hates it. It’s very hard to keep it from happening because it’s easy to copy printed books. All it takes to make a pirated PDF of a D&D book is a computer, a scanner, a couple hours, and somebody patient enough to push a button about 200 times. That’ll just make an obscenely large PDF full of bitmapped images of each page. Real dedicated pirates might sit down and type in all the words on each page so the document is searchable. We’re still talking a couple hours’ time here.
I understand WotC’s apprehension about distributing digital copies of their stuff, and I understand them wanting to take steps to stop it, but they’re not really doing anything but making their paying customers crazy. DRM is a wonderful thought, but let’s face it: somebody is going to eventually figure out how to break any protection scheme, followed by copiously bittorrenting an unprotected version. All the DRM in the world isn’t going to stop it. Not offering legitimate digital copies of their books definitely isn’t going to stop it (right now there’s only one way to get a digital version of a D&D book, and it ain’t legal).
So what is going to stop the piracy of WotC’s intellectual property?
To be honest, I doubt anything will solve the problem completely, especially as long as there are print books. Ebook publishers have long used other methods to ensure books don’t get widely pirated, such as custom-generating an individual digitally watermarked copy of an ebook for a customer. I’m much less likely to distribute a copyrighted PDF I bought to random strangers with dubious intent if it has my name and email address on every page.
I’d be happy if we just got that, but I think everyone’s interests would be much better served if WotC came up with a business model where stopping piracy isn’t necessary.
Prepare To Repel Boarders
Piracy-resistant business models already exist in today’s market. What separates them is that they can offer something that you can’t get simply by copying files and data. World of Warcraft and other MMOs are an example of this. There have been cases where the WoW client and even the server software have been pirated. I hope those guys had fun questing all by themselves, because they definitely weren’t getting anywhere near all the game had to offer. Many software companies will check for a valid registration before they offer tech support, access to forums, and other online features.
See a trend there? The Internet gives us options we didn’t have 25 years ago, and WotC already has a lot of the infrastructure they’d need to leverage these options in the form of D&D Insider. The people pirating books probably aren’t going to be giving you any money anytime soon. Providing a subscription model that gives you things you can’t get anywhere else might be a way to turn these people into customers.
That, to me, is pretty powerful stuff.
The D&D Book Of The Future
Remember all that business with the server I was going on about last week where it could spit out lots of cool data? Here’s one idea where that sort of thing would really shine:
Imagine having a digital copy of a D&D book. It’s searchable. Woo hoo and all that. I know you guys are thrilled. We’re at a quality level pirates can provide to us. Now let’s make this thing epic.
All of this stuff would pull in the most recent data from DDI, effectively making each book a living document. We could start by having the book automatically update itself with the latest errata. Handy, but not earth-shattering. Now let’s throw in some tools that make the book’s content easier to use.
There are a lot of little tables in D&D books, and most of the time you’re looking in those either to figure out what you get at X level, or rolling up something random. We could not only take the work out of this, but always have the latest options to choose from in these tables courtesy the data from DDI. Imagine, instead of “Table 1.8: Random Treasure Rewards”, having something that could take in the party’s level and it tells you what they got. The DMG might come with tools that let you do simple things like rolling random encounter tables, or it could randomly generate a whole encounter for you (including a unique map), complete with options you could tweak.
I like the idea of little boxes and apps that perform useful functions, but the real magic in this is these materials could be available right there in the relevant section of the book. For instance, when you’re selecting feats, spells, and other abilities, the PHB could read your character sheet and filter its content or make suggestions based on what prerequisites your character meets. Sure, the Character Builder does some of these things already, but this would give you that kind of power while keeping things in a more human-friendly context. How awesome would it be to look through a spell list in the PHB and drag your choices to your spellbook in the Character Builder?
The magic is that you could do all these cool things, but still use your D&D books in a very similar way to what you’ve done since the late 70′s. And there’s certainly nothing that says these tools couldn’t be all indexed in one place for easy finding, or that hyperlinks couldn’t be made in various parts of the book to access relevant materials. I’d especially like to see these books able to print and export the things you create so your prep time is diminished.
I could go on for hours just coming up with random neat ideas. The possibilities are wide open.
In The Year 2000
This isn’t science fiction. The technology to make this happen already exists. The use of laptop computers and tablets these days is very widespread, even at gaming tables. PDFs can have custom code in them that allows them to access data remotely, as can proprietary ebook formats like those the Kindle, Nook, and iPad. (Though, when doing this, it will be necessary to keep cross-platform compatibility firmly in mind.)
One thing I’ve never quite understood about the D&D Compendium in its current form is that (with your subscription) you get access to information from every 4e book out there regardless of whether you own it. Sure, I like having access to it, but in a situation where you’re trying to get a decent revenue stream, it seems to me like you could mark data on the server with what source it came from and restrict content to only what a given user has purchased (and registered). A strategy like this would incentivize new purchases since all your books (and 3rd party DDI-powered applications!) would update with new material every time you got something new. I understand there are some challenges that have already been discovered about linking physical purchases to unlocking online content, but this might be worth revisiting if the benefits outweigh the problems.
Will it take lots of development work? You bet. But if a lot of the magic happens server-side and requires a DDI account to utilize, you could pirate it all day and it would be largely unusable. Are there some tradeoffs? Sure. Some people won’t like needing an Internet connection to use the books, and there are doubtless other technical considerations and pitfalls. Past those, though, you’ve now got a version of your book that keeps itself current, links itself up to all the other legit D&D products you own, and will be a lot more desirable to have than a pirated 40mb unsearchable PDF file that takes forever to load each page and crashes most tablets.
Don’t try to stop piracy. Make it irrelevant.
Pixellated Hopes For A Digital Tomorrow
I realize I have just pipe-dreamt up an enormously tall order that probably won’t come into being anytime soon. Nobody has what I’ve talked about above, and I sincerely doubt I’m the first to think of this. Whether the piracy-resistant nature of a system like this will make a tabletop gaming company invest the money and manpower into developing and maintaining it remains to be seen.
I have hopes that we’ll see something like this eventually, but I’m not holding my breath. I think effective use of DDI will be the key to WotC’s digital success, digital books or not.
Ultimately, though, I hope I’ve nudged a few minds toward the notion that a company can keep its intellectual property safe in a way that encourages business and greatly increases the user experience of their customers. I hope that’s WotC ultimately shoots for, no matter what solutions they decide to go with.
Photo Credit
Pain of Publication: Book Review of “Low Town”
Previously I’ve talked about my previous novel attempts, difficult revisions and cutting, and actually getting work done. Whereas I normally review books in a vacuum, this time I am reviewing a book and weaving some lessons learned into my own Pain of Publication series.
Low Town is the debut novel of fellow Dickinson alumni, Daniel Polansky. Mr. Polansky knew many of the same people I did in college, but even in a small liberal arts school like Dickinson our paths never crossed. It’s a damn shame because Low Town is a rollicking mash up of two great genres: noir and fantasy. The author skillfully weaves a first person narrative in a way that vibrantly develops the setting into a living, breathing, festering, and foul supporting character unto itself.
Setting
The book is named after the impoverished underbelly of the Imperial Capital and the vast majority of the action takes place in this fetid urban sprawl. The book follows a man simply known as The Warden: an independent drug dealer with a wonderfully checkered past. He ends up caught in a tangled web of child murders where his own conscience and the machinations of others forces him into solving one last mystery. Although we only see things through the eyes of The Warden, we get a good feel for the supporting cast and an incredible appreciation for the misery that is Low Town. The author pulls no punches depicting graphic violence and frequent drug use. There is a sense of history to the world, but the author walks the tight rope of unfurling the past slowly and only inasmuch as it bears an impact on the story of The Warden. Proper nouns and slang give Low Town its own feel without impairing the readability of the novel. However, only three or four characters besides The Warden manage to stick out. This did not bother me though, as the same word count that often goes into character development was instead packaged as setting development. Low Town was great, but if you like your fantasy noble then stay out of Low Town. [Read the rest of this article]
Recompiling Digital D&D
A common complaint with 4th Edition has been the online tools that go with it. Now that we have a Next Edition coming, WotC gets another shot at getting their cyberducks in a row. The best part is, this time out they’re asking all of us what we want from D&D. Guess what? I want better online tools! Furthermore, I have a few suggestions. WARNING: Some programmer jargon ahead. Proceed with digital caution.
From The Ground Up
One of the most annoying things about 4e’s digital offerings is one that need to get addressed in the new edition immediately before all the decisions get made: the choice of development platform. 4e’s online tools were at first a PC-only application, then went to Microsoft Silverlight — which caused a lot of issues, especially for gamers using Mac or Linux. The programs themselves were far more bloated and slow than they needed to be, and they weren’t particularly stable.
The new D&D needs to choose something light and scalable to create their next-gen digital tools, and they need to keep cross-platform compatibility and various device form factors in mind. PCs and Macs need to be able to use this stuff, and both iOS and Android smartphones and tablets are common now.
With so many devices and possible configurations of machines using these tools, One Frontend To Rule Them All is going to be unwieldy and unpleasant to use. Developing for multiple platforms can be time-consuming and expensive.
One way to address this issue is to develop an extremely robust backend system to serve out data (using XML, JSON, or some similar format) to a series of relatively lightweight frontends designed for each platform. Especially with a system that’s probably going to rely on pulling data from the Internet, it makes a lot more sense to do the heavy lifting server-side instead of replicating similar functionality for each individual client program.
With a good backend system, developers are now free to write platform-specific apps using tools appropriate for that platform. It also means that when the game rules change, it’s much likelier that a program needs to get changed only once (on the backend) and the client apps may never know the difference.
In simpler terms, I want a giant WotC supercomputer in the sky that programs can ask for things over the Internets. It does the math, and sends the results back to the program. That means the apps we use on our smartphones and tablets don’t have to do much aside from knowing how to ask for data and how to process what it gets back, and that means they’re easy (and cheap) to develop.
API IDSPISPOPD IDKFA
As a software developer, it is my natural tendency to want to make things that are fun and useful. Especially in this day of Internets-capable mobile devices that I can have with me at the gaming table, I’m perfectly happy allowing the tiny computer in my pocket to handle lots of math and randomly generate a level-appropriate encounter at my whim. I like the idea of searching for a game mechanic in multiple books at once, cutting down on research time and reducing the Rules Lawyer Filibuster to only the length of time it takes to argue something pointless.
D&D is a very complex beast, and there’s an awful lot of data associated with pretty much everything. To make tools that are really useful, we need that data in a form we can find quickly.
That big WotC sky-computer I was talking about before? It already exists (to a certain extent). Problem is, we have trouble talking to it.
With D&D Insider, WotC made a big giant database full of monsters, abilities, and items (which many of you access today). To their credit, they’ve been really good about keeping this database up to date with all their latest materials. They also provided us with an API (application programming interface) so code-monkeys like me could query their database for stuff using our own programs. Unfortunately, the API was never very well documented, and seems to have been abandoned at some point. This means it’s really hard to make apps to use with 4e, and the data you can retrieve is pretty limited. There have been some cool hacks out there, but (especially in a community as creative as ours) it’s really hamstrung what we have been able to do.
I think a powerful, easy to access backend system is pretty essential to the success of any digital products for the next edition of D&D, both for internal and 3rd party tool development. I hope it’s at the forefront of their digital team’s minds this time around.
Project Hive-Brain
Everybody has their wishlist for the upcoming edition. I have a few bullet points on mine, but only one that I really want to stand up and fight for:
I want WotC to shore up their digital offerings by encouraging the community to fill in the gaps.
Official polished D&D apps created by WotC would be extremely nice. If I can’t have that, I want WotC to let us ENCOURAGE us to make them.
Ideally, I’d like to see WotC showcasing popular D&D apps — even buying out/sponsoring/giving its blessing to/unofficially adopting really good ones that provide for its customers’ needs. It would spur a lot of development and raise the morale of the community, and in return their game could now do things it couldn’t before. If WotC needs them to a particular specification in order to get the Official D&D Stamp Of Approval, my guess is a lot of developers would comply.
It’d be great if we, as 3rd party developers, could work more closely with WotC on our projects. I don’t know what form this would take. It might mean giving us access to speak with their IT team, or designating someone (either in-house or from the community) to act as a developer liaison. This isn’t one of those projects where you can determine everything everyone will need at the start. Things will change, and being able to relay these changes to someone who can make it happen is a huge boon to our community. Whatever happens, better communication would be a really welcome thing and would smooth out a lot of problems.
Allowing 3rd party development to flourish means that the reasons we don’t have good digital D&D tools no longer include WotC having insufficient staff, time, or budget to make them. Our hobby has a stereotype for a reason. The sheer amount of computer science in our community is staggering. Let’s put it to good use.
End Of Line
I find it amusing that the R&D team keeps talking about the new D&D as a core system that you can attach modules to so you can play they game you want to play and it’ll all work together.
That’s basically what I’m proposing with this whole big backend/little client idea. I’m sure everyone would accept the idea based on nothing but how accurate the analogy is, but I do really think it’s a good idea (and a commonly used practice). It is, though, just one idea and I’m certain there are those who will disagree with me. If you do disagree, or if you have some other ideas, let’s hear them.
At the end of the day, I just want WotC to make sure their digital offerings help them to make D&D Next the game everybody wants to play, rather than being annoying. With so many potential play styles and other factors in play, having something that can do the work for us is going to be necessary.
TL;DR beep beep boop 110011010011
The Road Not Taken: Alternative Directions For A Post 4e D&D
By now, the news is out that a new edition of D&D is on its way. While I’m looking forward to further playtesting on this new edition, I’m not quite ready to leave 4e behind completely. There’s still at least one more campaign I’d like to run using it.
Of course, as a game designer, I can’t help but still tinker with some of the pieces. I’ve done it before with the game, and have thought about further hacks. In the context of a new edition, there are any number of ways that an edition after 4th edition could go, while still building on the foundation of the game. While the publicly available info on the game seems to suggest that the new version will be different, hewing to ideas created in pre-4e editions, I have a few ideas for how a closer to 4e new edition could have gone. Here’s a few ideas for the D&D hackers out there. [Read the rest of this article]
Where D&D is Heading; or, How the Internet Changed a Game
Most people with a strong interest in D&D were not surprised by the recent announcement that Wizards of the Coast is in the process of creating and playtesting the next iteration of the game. The signs of its arrival were pretty clear if you knew where to look: the split in the player base, the design tenets of the most recent Wizards’ publications, the staffing changes at Wizards, the contents of various articles on the Wizards’ website, and many other clues hinted at a large-scale project in the offing.
Although the announcement was made just a few short days ago, speculation, discussion, analysis, and predictions are running rampant in every corner of the RPG world in anticipating of the D&D Experience convention, where the first public playtests will be held. As one would expect, the chatter runs the gamut from the typical Wizards-bashing on one end to outright giddiness on the other. As a freelancer who has done a bit of work for Wizards over the past few years, my natural inclination is to the side of giddiness. I have both a sentimental attachment and a professional interest that strongly hopes Wizards succeeds spectacularly. Indeed, I will continue to work to my best ability to make sure that happens in any of my projects.
However, there is the part of me that has been playing and enjoying D&D for three decades. That part of me must also look at the hobby, the business, and the game objectively. This new version of the game will be the one that my daughter will play during the same time of her life when I started playing, when all those amazing hours of fun and shared storytelling helped make me the person I am. I want the game to be fun and challenging and smart and encouraging imagination. I want that for her, and for me, and for players everywhere.
Long Ago and Far Away
The goals of the new design team are simply expressed but will be incredibly difficult to fulfill: bring all of the best parts of previous editions into a new iteration that players with different desires can play together. Cynics scoff at this as an impossible task, and they might right. That’s OK. I think that it is a goal worth pursuing, even if the final results fall short of it. You cannot even approach the goal if you don’t try.
The first step in meeting that goal is recognizing the evolution of the game. I know that many of the members of the design team have been playing older editions of the game to remind themselves, with first-hand experience, what those games were like. I have not had the chance to play the games, but I have gone through my old books (conveniently timed thanks to some house remodeling) to refresh my memory about what the rules of the game once were, and how my groups used those rules.
Rather than a point-by-point, edition-by-edition rundown of where the game has been, I must summarize. I owe my sanity that. The next months and years that the new iteration will be in design will see enough evaluation of older games to keep one busy reading. Some very smart people have already started.
What I will try to look at are what I see as the general trends rather than specific rules. (Some of these trends I have brought up in past articles in different contexts, so if I repeat myself much I apologize. Just consider it practice for when I will start embarrassing my family. More than I already do.) AD&D (sometimes called First Edition) was a mess of a rules set, in terms of mechanics of a game—and yet it was probably the most fun I’ve ever had gaming. I’m sure some of this is nostalgia, but not all of it is. I’m sure some of this is the newness of the game and the genre, but not all of it is. Looking back at that edition from the perspective of a designer and through the lens of countless RPGs, the game just excelled at getting to the stories. It might be because the game “borrowed” from so many great works of fiction that you couldn’t help be in a story as you played. Part of it had to be because there were so few choices that a character could make in terms of game elements that all of the decisions were made in the game.
I do strongly believe that a large part, and perhaps the largest part, of the games draw was that each group that played had to basically design their own game. Like I said, the rules were quite interesting, in that Chinese proverb sort of way. Those who are very generous say that the rules were written as they were because they were guidelines. Well, I can tell you that they became guidelines pretty quickly regardless of the intent, because most of them were house-ruled into something completely different. And I don’t mean “Little House on the Prairie” house-ruled. I mean “200,000-square-foot mansion” house-ruled. The game was great because it was a game that the group created as much as the published rules did.
In this game, the DM was in control. There was no question about it. Sure, different DMs ran things differently and player input was usually welcomed, but the only rule of the game was that the DM made the rules. Players who have grown up with discussion boards and errata and computer games might shudder at this, but not only was it not scary or dictatorial, it was liberating. Yes, the DM was in charge of the story, but, when done right, so were the players. For groups that got along and understood how they wanted the game to play, it was Zen-like: the more you let go of the control, the more control of the story you had.
The Connection Is Made
Another thing to remember, as it will become important later, is that there was no significant inter-connectedness like there is today with our Facebooks and Twitters and infinite niche forums. A few small conventions and periodicals (we had this stuff called paper back then) were the main places for cross-pollination of ideas. For the most part, people were playing and not really worrying about how other people were playing. A “character optimization board” was the piece of wood the DM hit you with when you thought your PC was so cool and invincible. Min-maxing was finding a way to flick your wrist just right so that your wizard PC got 4 hit points when he leveled instead of just 1.
When Second Edition D&D was released, I didn’t notice much of a change in the game. A few more options were offered to the PCs, giving the player a few more decisions to make. It seemed like a little power was taken away from the DMs and given to the players, but all of my groups soldiered on with little thought. We ignored a lot of the extra material that was released at the end of the 1990s, and just continued our happy campaigns with all our favorite house-rules and quirks.
Third Edition turned everything on its ear. This was both good and bad. It became a much better game in terms of rule mechanics. Elements of the game that were convoluted and seemingly mystical became as easy as beginning algebra. We all know that huge weight that was lifted when THAC0 went away. Players now longer had to worry or wonder about what a DM might do to make things rough for them regarding how something worked, because there seemed to be a rule for everything.
And then there were the character rules. All of the character options, the multiclassing freedoms, the customization through feats: it was a player’s dream. And for all that, it was also a DM’s nightmare. Whereas everything in the first two editions seemed to focus on exploration and story, everything in this edition seemed to focus on the rules. Opening a door became a rule. And the rule was written down. The rules became a tool of the player and a burden to the DM. This edition of the game was the first that I voluntarily stopped playing because I was just burned out. And what made it worse for me was the discussion of the rules. It was bad enough that the players were pulling out 4 different books to try to argue a miniscule point. But now they could pull out their laptops and show 45 other people all pulling out their own books and argue the same points.
Fourth Edition came just in time. I was seconds away from taking up a less frustrating pastime like demolitions or shark baiting. This edition began to return some of the power to the DM. Not a lot, but a little. Most of the power was returned by streamlining rules to get them out of the way so the story could come back into focus. And some of the player rules were streamlined as well. Those of us who had DMed and played in the earliest editions could see the old “exploration and story” light at the end of the tunnel. But things were still a little off. That light was blocked a bit by a strong focus on “encounters” which emphasized the same grid-and-movement mindset that 3e introduced. The feeling of “campaign” that the earliest editions encouraged was still a bit hazy, especially for those who only played 3e and 4e.
Old Arguments, New Technologies
And the Internet is still there. It gives us the beauty of communication, but we use it to clamor for errata and clarification and justification and perfection. We have a tool for sharing stories like no other, and we use it to nitpick and gripe and limit our imaginations rather than free them. I am as guilty as anyone in this, perhaps moreso. I have striven to make campaigns that embrace the ugly perfection of rules over the beauty chaos of a story shared. And in my foolishness, I would probably make the same mistakes again.
Having said all this, I need to make it clear that this is just my severely biased opinion, and it is a bunch of opinions that have been simplified and distilled down to an essence that does not capture my whole experience. I have loved D&D since even before they added the “A” at the beginning. Even at its most frustrating, I would still take a game of any edition of D&D over just about any other hobby to share with a group of friends (or in some cases, strangers). There is still more story in even the most tactical game of D&D than there is in all reality TV put together. Unless “Celebrity Housekeepers of Waterdeep” is on some network’s spring schedule.
So, as I sit with everyone else and wait to see the first draft of the rules that we will all get to playtest, I have much hope for what the game can become. I would love to see the streamlined balance of 4e, the players’ ability to create a truly unique character of 3e, but the power for the DM to bring about an inspiring and fun story that was enjoyed most in those earliest versions of the game. It may not happen, but count me as one of those cheering that we are all going to get a chance to make it happen together.
The Pain of Publication III: Making the Most of your Work Sessions
Previously I’ve talked about my previous novel attempts and about difficult revisions and cutting. Today I’d like to talk about actually getting to work.
The reality for most aspiring authors is that their writing has to give way to the realities of a full life outside of it. Most of the time, that means squeezing in time in between your job that pays you and other life activities. However, sometimes you can get lucky and have the opportunity to spend a large dedicated chunk of time writing without work getting in the way. Having neglected to use my vacation time much over the past few years, I found myself with time off to spare and resolved to take a work week off and write. And so, between Christmas and New Years I had nothing to do but write… and do family things for the holidays, of course.
This column is about getting the most out of your time during those brief times you ought to be able to dedicate to writing and coping with the inevitable interferences that will crop up. [Read the rest of this article]
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