Edition Changes and updates

Hello to anyone that reads my blog. I have had a bit of trouble coming up with ideas but recently I actually managed to come up with something that might be interesting, game edition shifts and updates. They always tend to cause frustration in people as well as hope, hope for improvements and streamlining. Hope that major issues in the current game will be fixed and that the new system will emerge stronger and better organized. In essence the players hope for a more evolved system, and just as often people fear the changes. They fear the system that they've grown comfortable with changing into something foreign. They fear a system that makes players too strong or weak, that radically changes how things were done. Every time that a game changes editions there is a barbeque of sacred cows.

Talk to anyone that has a favorite game or system, when D&D changed from 2nd to 3rd edition, and when 3.5 came out, and again when it became 4th edition there were complaints on each one, some loud, some quiet. Some reasoned, some simple rage, but the complaints filled blogs and forums. The same is true for the new world of darkness and the new versions of the settings that were brought forward, when Deadlands became Savage Worlds the same thing happened. It happens regardless, but the big question should really be what creates the hostility, and for that matter why do some people jump forward to the new system, only to leave it later?

I already mentioned some of what caused my group to jump to 4th edition when it came out. It created a system where all the classes were in fact playing the same game, gameplay was more streamlined, and overall the system was far more balanced. Now this opinion changed over time, as you can see by going through my archives. What I find interesting is that looking back at it 4th edition seemed to fall apart as fast as it produced new things to fix itself, but I digress. The stuff for Deadlands between the original formats and the Savage World settings are also worth studying. Armor and toughness are different so are the concepts of arcane backgrounds and power growth. While I can see some definite advantages in the new system I find myself preferring the old one.

Gamma world is another example, look at each edition, each one had a different attitude and style, some more serious than others. I will say I quite like the latest incarnation that uses the 4th edition model, and uses it much better than the 4th edition game IMO. What is it that brings us to keep an edition or leap to the new one, I have a few guesses.

1) Fear of change or desire for it can motivate the migration or staying with an edition. In some cases people are comfortable with an older system and are more willing to use a few houserules and argue that a new edition will either be unnecessary or will introduce new problems and headaches, aside from having to relearn the mechanics. Similarly, there are people who get frustrated with a system and having to alter it, remake it, and in some cases have entire books devoted to clarifying rules (The Rules Compendium of 3.5 was a great argument for 4th edition let me say). For world of darkness it could have been trying to juggle rules between different 'settings' like Werewolf, Vampire, Mage, etc. It also could have been the fact that their tabletop and larping systems reacted very differently and had a lot of balance complaints.

2) Sacred Cows, once again this is an area that causes people to want to change or want to keep. People will sometimes look at a game and say "This isn't X" people would say that 4th edition wasn't D&D, that the products for the New World Of Darkness weren't 'really' Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc. The usual reason for it was that the sacred cows had ben barbecued, vanican spellcasting was gone, class distinctions were annihilated or reshaped. Principles that had guided design for supernatural beings in the world of darkness were suddenly wildly different. Some people hated these things, I will say that Vancian Spellcasting is probably one of the biggest problems for game balance in 3.5 D&D and in the current Pathfinder. I will also say that getting rid of it as they did also probably helped create some of the problems that 4th edition faced. Some people are afraid of losing something that's been part of the system from the get-go, and others see those things as either anachronisms or bad design choices.

3) Cash, a simple one, and more towards keeping to an older edition. If you have a game that runs well the idea of forking over more money for new books that essentially invalidate your old ones can be infuriating. And it can also be annoying that things you would have been happy to pay money for (expansions on a few new power systems, books for greater customization levels, etc.) are no longer being made for your game of choice, at least in the incarnation you have most of the other stuff for.

4) Simplicity, another argument in either direction. A person familiar with an edition will usually know all the necessary rules or at least have houserules and rulings to deal with hiccups. That being said there can be huge rule cludges that are either avoided or rewritten, things that come up after multiple sourcebooks and errata colliding with one another as well as the ubiquitous problem of player inventiveness. New editions tend to be fairly simple to start off, rules are streamlined and USUALLY the books don't have too many glaring errors or problems, but you usually have to relearn the system and rules not to mention the problem of dealing with new errata and rulebooks adding new features and changing things.

Now playing groups and the like are part of it too but those are a bit more subjective and this is more based on personal desires one way or the other. Any other ideas, comments, etc. are welcome. I hope to hear from someone.

Does Balance Matter?

Some of you out there are probably familiar with the game Gamma World, for those of you that are younger or more familiar with the most recent release of it (quite fun btw) it is a very fun and very bizarre game. One thing that I find is that there are a lot of people who enjoy Gamma World in part because it is so crazy and to an extent because it is imbalanced. You can be a super mutant with radiation powers and have a suit of power armor alongside a crazy feral person with a sword, and oddly it doesn't matter too much. The game does somewhat assume frequent deaths, but really you can have people of wildly disparate power levels in the game and it will still be fairly fun.

Now some of it might be that Gamma World runs heavily off of the weird factor, IE a big part of the enjoyment is more the bizarre spectacle than say balanced gameplay. On a note with my own group, I have mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Deadlands, my group currently has a Deadlands game going. When I set up a Savage World jaunt for them briefly I got a few positive responses but a lot of negative ones. Now Savage Worlds is more balanced, and the response may have been more rooted in either a desire for familiarity or something similar but I found it interesting that by and large their reaction was relatively negative towards it. A few of them even commented that the relatively imbalanced nature of the game was part of the fun.

For the record my group does generally care about game balance and if someone has abilities that are dominating combats and the like we usually talk about either nerfing or altering how the abilities work. And I'm sure that's true in most games. Maybe the question should be if balance really matters but also what we mean by balance.

Character deaths

I got into a rather interesting discussion recently which helped me around some bloggers block. One of the things brought up was the idea of a game where it was hard for PCs to die, or as he put it 'Care Bearing'. I thought about it, now in my games character death can vary wildly depending on systems but I will admit that I tend to be a bit more merciful than some, maybe due to player complaints or because of how I feel about games. Some of it is that I have fairly clever players, and some of it is that I try to avoid doing games that are going to eat the players alive consistently. Another person that was somewhat intermittently involved mentioned that he enjoys the look on players faces when their characters die, usually the shock that it happened, and complained that modern games coddle players too much. The person I was talking more directly to also complained about ideas like game balance and the like.

I disagree on a few fronts, but some of it also has to do with how I view the games. For example, in most editions of gamma world I've played you can whip up a new character quite fast and frequent deaths are part and parcel of the experience. The same can be said for games like All Flesh Must be Eaten or even certain games using the Cthulhu mythos. Some old school fantasy games are similar, in these cases death might be annoying but the relative speed in which you can make a new character means that the death won't mean that either the player is sitting out for most of the night or that everyone else has to put things on hold while a new character is made. In such games character deaths aren't a big deal and can even be a source of amusement.

Take games that have more involved character generation however, say for example something from the folks at Palladium, and a character death could set you back hours in terms of time spent generating a new character. There is also the argument about how a character dies, is it different if they die from a single failed saving throw than if they died in a mass battle? If there are resurrection options in the game that might change things too, but how accessible do you make it for players? (IE at low levels do they have to suck it up and just wait until the cleric gets high enough to resurrect before they can die and keep their character?) Then again there is the question of if character deaths mean anything to the players or game itself. If you have a big story planned is it better to just keep the basic group alive so they don't have to keep reading the new guy or gal into the groups mission and enemy list or is it necessary to make sure that you prune their numbers so they don't get too sure of themselves?

Well, any readers out there are welcome to comment, hope to hear from you.

Magnificent Failures: Magic of Incarnum

One thing that I've been thinking on recently is on a lot of game supplements that were what I would call magnificent failures. These are games or supplements that while they never quite managed to catch or really get a big level of focus or were somehow flawed still had a really good concept, idea or system that was lurking under the problems. One of my favorite examples for this was a D&D game for 3rd edition called Magic of Incarnum, it was a supplement that offered a new kind of magic system to the game.

Thematically Incarnum was the calling and binding of souls, you called on the essence of all who lived and all yet to be born, you channeled this energy into objects that symbolized heroes, villains, warriors, thieves, etc. It was a very interesting system conceptually, you could mix and match powers and features to either gain new abilities or augment existing ones. There were also a few options for someone wanting to dabble in it a bit the real problem with the system however is that...well it was very poorly implemented.

Using the powers to their fullest extent meant giving up item slots, doable and there were options for sharing slots and the like but it was still kind of iffy. Also a lot of it involved juggling a second resource called 'essentia' that you got from being an incarnum using class or by taking incarnum feats that granted you essentia in 1 per feat. You had to track how much essentia you invested in the feats, the soulmelds, etc. and you couldn't change it during the day so you had to make sure you knew what you wanted to do and what was supposed to go where. It was clunky and it added a lot of extra book keeping.

The secondary issue was this, the classes themselves that were meant to be the central incarnum users were for lack of a better term questionably designed. The Totemist was probably the best designed of the three but the problem I have with it is that it depends heavily on the natural weapons that some of its soulmelds offer without bothering to explain how they interact and essentially 'locking' certain slots automatically during game progression, it's overall still pretty good but it was a pet peeve. The Soulborn was the second creation, this one was more a problem of there not really being enough of the actual class feature available. What I mean is this, the class itself didn't get much to actually use the soulmelds and abilities this was particularly bothersome because it made it feel like they, a class BUILT for using the new system, were little more than dabblers.

The third class needs a lot of explanation, the Incarnate was sort of the flagship for the Incarnum classes in my view. It had the most essentia, most access to soulmelds and gained them the fastest. It had full armor proficiency and full weapon proficiency, decent saves as well, in fact there was only one problem, it had the base attack bonus of a primary caster, IE the wizards. The first problem here is simply that looking at it was a little confusing, most of the stuff shown, and the description they gave said that this was a combatant that harnessed Incarnum to augment themselves and their allies, but the wizard BaB said that they were going to have trouble hitting and that their main focus would apparently be elsewhere.

I think that there were two reasons that this happened, and it probably also explains why the Soulborn actually got so few Incarnum soulmelds. The first is that because of how a lot of the soulmelds worked you could actually get a really good bonus to hit, probably edging out the fighter or at least getting close even on the poor base attack bonus. The second one is more that the soulmelds were really versatile, it wasn't just combat bonuses. They offered bonuses for just about every skill, if your group woke up locked in jail cells stripped of gear you could simply summon up the hands of the thief, the rogues vest and a few others and suddenly the jail cells might as well be made of paper.

I think the fear was that due to potential versatility they were afraid of the Incarnate becoming too powerful, the same with the Soulborn. This is one of the areas where the designers might have botched things a bit, it's kind of where theory and practice veer in different directions. The amount of versatility was hypothetically a major power for the Incarnate, but due to elements of design much of the vaunted versatility would sit unused. The reason was simply this, with everything but the base attack bonus proclaiming that it was meant to fight in melee or at least in ranged, most points and abilities were likely to veer in that direction, the other abilities were likely to sit unused unless say the person playing the rogue couldn't make it to that session or something similar.

It's not that the versatility idea was bad, just that given the nature of the class that had it it was unlikely to really be very often used. I view it in ways similar to high level wizard or sorcerer spells that were designed to turn them into melee powerhouses. While the spells themselves may have been impressive they weren't really all that likely to be used, or if they were something had likely gone wrong somewhere or things had changed rather radically.

What made Incarnum such a magnificent failure in my view is that while there were a lot of things that went wrong with Incarnum there was actually a lot of really great stuff here. The concept of essentially harnessing the raw spiritual energy of all the universes souls, shaped my archetypes of heroism or villainy, is a pretty neat idea. The sheer number of options that you could mix and match from was pretty cool too. The other thing is simply that the idea was unique, it was very different and very dynamic, I applaud innovation in game design and while this experiment might have been problematic it was still quite an interesting one.

When Roles Go Bad Pt. 2

Here I am for a belated part two. I apologize for taking so long but I hope it will be worth the wait. I mentioned that one issue that comes up in the role system is simply that the roles themselves can get in the way and screw things up trying to keep everything balanced. This area is a bit more subjective but can do a lot to impact fun as well as being common in video games as well as tabletop games. In essence it's a matter of things feeling overly similar, or 'samey'. IE two classes that are supposed to be different and distinct end up feeling identical in results and play.

In tabletop games I would argue this is somewhat easier to notice than it is in video games, the main reason I say this is that a video game can mask similar mechanics with graphics and thematic things that a tabletop game has to do a lot more work to conjure. Now things feeling samey is somewhat subject to interpretation and it can come from a lot of different things and have different levels of annoyance or frustration for the person working on things. Some matter more and some matter less, and I will try to address them quickly.

One area is when different classes in the same role start to feel samey, this could be due to similar mechanics or just because build information and damage output end up near identical. This can be frustrating in some regards but it isn't necessarily a major issue. In video games the mechanics, graphics, etc. can be utilized to make the differing classes seem more dissimilar while their overall output is about identical. In a tabletop game this is somewhat more obvious but it can be fairly manageable so long as the gameplay elements keep the classes feeling distinct or at least different enough so that the player doesn't wonder why there are two classes if they functionally do the same thing and are identical in most regards.

Another area has to do with different aspects of the same class, IE if there are different build options but both end up being about the same. On the one hand this can be somewhat expected, but when literally everything seems to be identical a problem crops up, the variant options seem superfluous when the end result is the same. It can make the player feel like their choice meant nothing and it can also feel like the book or supplement that the new option was put in was ultimately a waste. The way this can happen is if power choices, augmentation options etc. end up with a character functionally identical mechanically to the build of another type.

The basic problem is this, if classes feel samey, or if allegedly different options for the same class feel samey, it means that the designers screwed up. Part of the fun in a game that offers customization is making a character that feels unique, that is YOUR character, when the ability to do that is compromised the game suffers a bit. It gets worse when this sort of thing ends up being a means to nip system mastery in the bud, essentially making any abilities that improve hitting, defenses, etc. as a necessary and assumed thing, thus ensuring that there will be little to no ability to make your character 'better' than anyone else. The reason I link this as a problem the role system faces or at least tends to conjure more is that roles by nature have limits and locks on them, a healer should not be doing more damage than a straight damage dealer for example and this can lead to overreaction by designers and a fear that any customization could break the roles set up.

Declining of Dragons

As those who know me personally, and those who see my profile can guess, I am a big fan of dragons. Dragons to me represent a lot of cool things and they're great in a lot of fantasy games because they can be powerful enemies, dangerous masterminds, knowledgeable oracles, puissant allies, you get the idea. In the fantasy role playing game that most people know, Dungeons and Dragons, the Dragon is one of the most dangerous opponents you can fight. They have thick armored scales, razor sharp claws and teeth, they hit like trucks, their breath is charged with elemental energy, the oldest dragons can shrug off all but the most heavily enchanted weapons and of course there's the fact that they can also use magic. The magic thing was probably one of the more interesting things with dragons as monsters, spells offer all kinds of variables and interesting options, it also meant that you could theoretically fight a full string of red dragons and the fights might be radically different in theme and feel based almost entirely on the spell list held by each dragon. Now for some people it was an issue, dragons could theoretically end up more powerful than listed because of a great spell selection or the person running might forget to use them, you get the idea. I mention this because of what they did for fourth edition D&D.

4th edition changed a lot of things, for one thing the vancian magic system was dropped. The vancian system being a setup where you had slots for spells that were expended in casting along with levels of power for different spells. This also meant that dragons no longer used magic, they followed the same format as the other monsters, this was both good and bad. The good was that they were easier to use and required less prep time. But there were two problems that came from this, well I'd almost argue three but some of it is my own bias and not really what I would say a system problem is.

The first problem was that the dragons got very samey, in that while dragons did vary color to color in terms of abilities and tactics one red dragon was more or less identical to another, they did add some stuff in their Dragonomicon supplements but things still felt fairly identical. The issue is that if the fights start feeling similar it's harder to stay engaged in the game and the story. Not to mention that the changes between the dragons in terms of age category (the older dragons get the stronger they get) was really fairly incremental. I understand that that's part of how the system works but it also meant that facing dragons through age categories didn't become inherently more threatening so much as it felt more like they were slightly bigger and maybe hit a bit harder, though once or twice getting a new power.

The second problem was a combination of how the dragons got stronger and again an issue with how monsters were designed. If you get a chance to look through monster manuals, (the first through the third one at least since my group more or less dropped the game before MM4 so I can't speak on it), the monsters at mid paragon tier and up level get craploads of extra effects. Not even attack exactly but constant effects, energy auras, things that kick in when they hit half HP, recharge effects, random reaction powers, their standard stuff, synergy effects, etc. The problem with this for me was that while yes, in theory a fight was easier and faster to prepare and design it took a hell of a lot longer to run and was harder to track. I had to keep reminding myself of how big an aura was so that if a monster moved or if a player did I could figure out if there were going to be things kicking in. I had to watch player positions because some monsters, dragons especially, had things talking about what happens if a player is in one place or another, IE player goes behind dragon, dragon automatically smacks with tail, forcibly moves player, and maybe adds a status effect. It meant that I had a much harder time keeping track of abilities and effects, I had players getting angry with me for not explaining something completely but I was trying to track everything and more than once had to pause or I had missed things that were supposed to happen because I was tracking other stuff. There were a few exceptions, the Cobalt Dragon from the second Dragonomicon was actually fairly tightly designed and also a fun monster as an encounter but sadly it seemed to be an aberration as far as that went.

What makes this funny/enraging to me is that back when I ran 3rd edition I had a much easier time running encounters than I did in 4th. I will concede that some of it was experience but that wasn't it alone and when I thought about it I realized why. When I built an encounter in 3rd edition many times I had either spellcasters or I had monsters that could use magic for high level stuff, and in many cases they started the fight with a lot of their magic already in use. They would cast self buff spells, conjure allies or other things. I could write down what the bonuses were and just mark what each thing was from, if someone could strip the buffs off, fine, if not then the stuff was listed there. What it meant was that while I did have to do a bit more work and take a bit more time designing the encounter it didn't take any longer to run or use in the actual battle. It also helped in other ways, spells are beautifully versatile and I can just play with the spell list a bit to change the feel and flavor in a combat as well as alter how the encounters work. Overall it meant that they could theoretically face 50 clerics of about the same level and each fight could be radically different. I'll wrap this up before I go on a full off topic tear but I'd say that it's a lot better to have to take a bit longer to design an encounter than it is to have to keep halting and pausing because you need to double check effects and interactions.

The third problem, and as I said before this is a personal thing rather than a direct problem in the system, is that dragons were demoted to being just another monster. I'll try to explain that in a way that makes sense, Dragons are supposed to be pretty damn powerful, but more than that, in 3rd edition they were best looked at as a kind of super character class, magic, highest base attack, best saves, along with a plethora of abilities, resistances and immunities. Dragons had a kind of majesty to them, and had enough built in options and versatility that dragons could be as varied as the player characters were, possibly even moreso. Because 4th edition is much more tightly structured the dragons were simply another solo monster, they might have been a bit tougher than the other solo monsters at their tier but they still didn't have the same level of oomph or majesty. I will say that a lot of it comes from the mechanics of the system but I am not going to call it a flaw of the system, more a side effect. I know people might have similar views on certain classes or maybe favorite monsters and while the systems format might make them stronger/weaker/whatever than they think the thing in question should be that's more an area of personal taste than a system hiccup.

The other thing in this, again a part of the system, was that dragons went down more or less the same way any other monster did. Back in the old days, I can't believe I'm saying that at my age, beating a dragon quickly normally was either a result of extreme luck or a lot of careful preparation assuming both sides are competent and the encounter is roughly level appropriate. In terms of luck it might be a series of lucky high damage critical hits, maybe the DM can't roll very well, but it comes down more to the players performing feats far above normal expectations, however this is still pretty good so long as it doesn't cause an anticlimax though plenty of groups might just enjoy it for the amusement factor. Careful preparation is a bit more common, the group tries to figure out what they can about the dragon, the color type indicates elemental strengths and weaknesses, the age helps determine size and power as well as hypothetically how potent the magic it can wield is as well as what sort of weapons or tactics might be needed. The other part of the preparation is using spells and consumable items (potions, scrolls, etc.) before the battle, IE you are also consuming a good chunk of resources to fight said dragon and make yourself really powerful against it. In this case they can probably overpower the dragon as well fairly quickly but they had to put a lot of work and resources into it which again is fairly reasonable. This level of planning is somewhat less necessary for other types of monsters barring things like titans, major demons and such, though they also don't have the full versatility either. Conversely in 4th edition the players can just charge in unprepared and the fight will be the same as against any other creature of about that level, though you can't really do out of combat preparations in 4th edition nor are there really many consumable items and such.

I guess some of this is my little lament about how dragons seemed to kind of decline. But also it's this, Dragons are in many ways the iconic fantasy monster, they're the big enemy, a symbol of fantasy. And I think in some ways the way that the dragons are portrayed and used can tell a bit about the game you're in, but that's just me.

Hitpoints and Damage scaling in 4th edition

Fourth edition had flaws, maybe one of the biggest areas had to do with the problem of hitpoint and damage scaling. I mentioned that one thing that had worked nicely was that the monsters at the early levels of play could threaten players, but likely wouldn’t kill them outright unless they were foolish or very unlucky. I believe in gameplay that early levels are sort of a time for training wheels, when you should be able to learn the abilities of your character and have some room to make rookie mistakes and learn the ropes. Earlier editions of D&D had it where you could die from a single strike from a blade at low levels, while this can heighten tension it also means that a bad initiative roll can wipe out a whole group before they even get to act. Fourth edition fixed this nicely, a decent sized pile of hitpoints at the beginning with a slow fixed amount gained at each level, it also helped equalize encounters since randomly rolled HP could either doom a player or make them practically impregnable depending how long they sat on one side or another of the luck curve for rolls.

While the system worked well in fourth edition it started falling apart after heroic tier, becoming damn near absurd in the epic tier. The problem was twofold on the monster angle, the first was that their hitpoints grew in great leaps and bounds but their damage refused to grow properly with it. This meant that after level 12-14 the fights began to turn into obnoxious slogs. Part of that was also that the amount of damage dealt by the monsters was fairly low compared to what the players had. While I get that this might have been built around the concept that they would deal more damage overall since they could last longer it didn’t really work out that way. I have described the experience as being something closer to trying to peel a really big potato while it occasionally pokes you with a toothpick rather than fighting a dangerous opponent. This made designing and running fights annoying, in many cases the players had functionally won the battle but their opponents were still fairly alive, so I could either simply declare a battle over with there still being a fair amount of creatures on the board or I could run the battle for another half hour. Despite being touted as being faster and more streamlined at higher levels this proved to be false, at least without some kind of aid, I took much longer building and running encounters than I did frequently in third edition.

Fourth edition had managed to mostly rid the game of rocket tag, where monsters and characters would fire off their biggest ability and try to devastate and destroy. This was good in that in theory battles would require more work and thought as well as more teamwork, discouraging lone wolf behavior. Unfortunately what was created in its place might be described as two sumo wrestlers wrapped in pillow armor trying to fight. Battles became annoying at best and frustrating at worst, the only types of monsters that could produce proper levels of damage were solo monsters and those weren’t really meant for constant back to back use. Part of the problem that came with this also is that battles got boring, players weren’t threatened by the monsters and the battles got to be repetitive and the players lost some of the investment. One of my favorite examples from the books is the printed statblock for Orcus, demon prince of the undead. Orcus had well over one thousand hitpoints, however Orcus didn’t really have a whole lot that threatened physically. Yes, he could probably kill at least one character in the party but it wasn’t of the level of threat that one would expect from the mighty demon prince of the undead. They did upgrade him a fair amount in a later published adventure, but in some ways that’s almost worse in that they had to almost entirely rebuild him to make him viable in any ways or means.

The other area where it got weird was that players hitpoints were more stable in increases but only solo monsters were able to take appreciable bites out of their hitpoints and even then it wasn’t always a sure thing. As mentioned before this makes the fights a lot less intense when those involved are able to take dozens or hundreds of hits before going down. While I sort of get the idea that was being pushed, players were supposed to be tougher and battles could last longer as well as more battles occurring during a day, it also gets hard to feel threatened when huge monsters can’t seem to land a reasonable blow on you. Some of the sense of fun in a game comes from there being difficulty, the problem wasn’t so much that the fights were too easy to win but that they were too hard to lose. While they sound similar it’s not really the same, it’s one thing where a fight is balanced somewhat towards the players but still has them at risk where they are likely to win but might end up with one or more characters badly injured or requiring some sort of expenditure of resources. In this version the players were usually able to strike down targets with fairly high speed and ability with relatively little sacrifice, it got worse when there were multiple leaders, IE those who could heal.

What it ultimately boils down to was that both sides had so many hitpoints relative to damage dealt that fights went on past tedium and the players weren’t especially threatened by monsters, not even the larger more potent creatures like dragons. This wasn’t the biggest problem in the game by itself though it was one of the biggest. The problem itself was a piece of what made my group walk away from the game but there’s more coming on that front.

4th Editions good points

I’m going to be a bit rough on 4th edition and while plenty of people are likely to agree that it deserves some of the lumps it’s getting it also needs to be pointed out that they actually did do some things very right. Some of them aren’t necessarily ideal for all games but they were improvements or at least worthwhile ideas. I’ll try to cover each of them and explain where I think things went well and where…well where they kind of screwed up. The main point of this though is that because I have seen a lot of examples of people strongly disliking 4th edition the goal here is to provide a kind of counter as well as try to give a more balanced take on what worked and what didn’t and trying to figure out why. Now I stress that pretty much all of this is opinion but I will explain my views as much as I can on each.

One idea that was a major winner in my view was the change they made to hitpoints. Just to clarify hitpoints were an abstraction showing how much damage you could take before you died. In the earlier games you started out small, especially if you were an arcane spellcaster, and in many cases even if you were incredibly hardy one good sword hit could knock you out or even kill you. The main issue I have with this is that it wasn’t a matter of doing something stupid and dying, it was a stray shot killing someone who had just started. It was making a situation where you could easily go through two or three characters in one night at low levels, especially at first through third level. The issue with this is threefold. First, new players were likely to experience a great deal of frustration, losing one character let alone two or more could make them wonder what the point is (and I am mostly using D&D as the example here, I know some games with very fast generation can allow for instant generation and thus death is less an issue). Second is that when starting the game a player is, at least in theory, learning their characters abilities and the rules of the game at low levels the game should have some form of training wheels be it more durability, comparatively fast recovery or something in that nature. Third was simply that it meant that the players weren’t constantly outnumbering each enemy they faced, IE four people to kill an orc or goblin creatures not exactly known for their supreme power.

Greater hitpoints meant that a player could handle attacks from a few more creatures, it also meant that they had time to try to get a handle on their abilities. They could learn about what their class did, what the others in the group were capable of, and figure out how to use abilities together. Part of it was also that hitpoints were gained more slowly, a flat small amount each level rather than wild swings as levels progressed. It made it easier to balance and build encounters on the designers end as well as helping things on the playing end. An encounter could exist where the players were outnumbered and not end with their characters all dead. It also meant that the players could be a bit more daring, stupidity would likely still end up with a dead or badly injured character but now they were unlikely to lose one simply due to one bit of bad luck or a rookie mistake.

The second improvement would be in the reintroduction of the roles system. I say reintroduction because in a lot of ways what they did was simply put in a more codified version of what we had back at the start of the game ‘Fighter, Thief, Magic User, Cleric’ or ‘Defender, Striker, Controller, Leader.’ The role system caught a lot of flack, claiming that it was ‘video gamey’ but the truth is that most games, at least many fantasy ones, run with the idea of a class focused on damage, a class focused on being ‘tough’ a class that heals and probably some skill classes or AoE ones. The concept of roles existed but either weren’t as codified or weren’t set in stone. The role system allowed for a few things, from a design standpoint it helped benchmark class abilities and figure out if something seemed too high or low since they had a clear set of parameters to test it against. From a playing standpoint, well it helped to know what the class was meant to do, in 3rd edition there were classes that I seriously had no bloody clue what they were meant to do because their design felt off, a class with full armor proficiency and full weapon proficiency and yet with the same attack bonus as a primary caster is a class that seems like the designers weren’t really thinking or at least weren’t considering how such a design looked. In some cases a class was made that was interesting but didn’t seem to have a hint as to what it was meant to do or how it worked in a group.

It also did help to avoid a problem that seems to come up frequently with classes that do the hybrid thing or ‘jack of all trades master of none’ schtick. The idea of a jack of all trades kind of class is nice in theory but in practice they will usually run into one of two walls. In one case their abilities are spread too thin to be anything more than middling in any area, if you have to take over for a teammate that falls you can’t really duplicate their skills in that role or you often just find yourself outperformed in everything. The other side of it is when a class is too potent, say 75% ability in a few roles of a base class coupled with synergy and while they might not be as good at X as the class focused on it they’re close enough and bring other things to the table so that the non hybrid ends up being worse in comparison. It can be a tricky balance and it often either falls into over or under power. There is also the fact that it can be hard to objectively determine balance when clear roles aren’t established and many classes can perform multiple roles, in some cases they can do it nearly simultaneously.

I also give them partial credit for making the monsters more interesting, or maybe it’s more accurate to say making the battles work more cleanly. At low levels players could face swarms of enemies, the minion rules and higher starting hitpoints made things like goblins and orcs a threat and it wasn’t a situation where you needed four people to kill one of them. The battles felt more interesting, the players felt stronger and scope of the campaign felt more epic. Also the idea of having monsters in different style categories similar to player roles helped new DMs design encounters and things like Elite and Solo monsters also helped people set up fights with a clearer concept of scale and threat.

They also did manage to make good on the promise of greatly reducing dependency on magic items. Bonuses to hit and damage and various things provided by items were often less important than player abilities and powers and I actually think that this was a fairly good thing. That being said, the changes did help make it so that you were no longer a set of items wearing a character for some of the classes, now the magic items while useful were no longer the defining characteristics.

In later posts I will point out flaws and issues and why my group walked away from 4th. Some of their initial plans went haywire and some things went wonky, but at the very least 4th edition did some good things and I feel they should be mentioned first.

Game Weights

Tabletop games, computer games, board games, all of them have a certain degree of weighting involved. The idea is where the majority of the power, the focus of the system, and the theoretical goals of the game lie. In my experience you either will see games weighted on the side of the player, games weighted centrally, or games weighted in favor of the system. Now, an important note, here is that none of these is necessarily inherently better or worse than the others, however they tend to lend themselves more easily to certain types of games. For example, a game weighted more towards the players tends to create excellent heroic games, more neutrally set games are theoretically more versatile and able to work with many genres, and the ones weighted more towards the system are best used for horror and survival games.

Games weighted in favor of the players are games that expect the players to win. The players are on average more durable and more powerful than the monsters and it is relatively difficult to lose if the game is used in its standard format. The players can be challenged but it is indeed difficult to wipe them out. Most heroic tapletop games follow this premise and in fact the d20 system could be said to be weighted heavily in favor of the players. A heroic game tends to give the players a greater margin of error, early levels have training wheels and the game tends to focus on approximate escalation, the players will sometimes face things stronger than them but their collective abilities will almost always outmatch it, they will also have more escape hatches and panic buttons than their opponents can match. In these games death for a character ranges from impossible to easily recoverable. Some games are actually set up where the player characters cannot die, one of the versions of 7th sea is like that. Others have death, but death is fairly easy to get around, either offering ressurection or similar means to return the character to life and continue on.

Games that have more neutral weight are fairly rare admittedly, but they do exist. By and large these games are point based, in this setup everyone has the same abilities to pull from and similar rules on the points spread. Characters can die and probably will. However, the idea in this case is more that the game assumes roughly equal chance between everything. These games are also a bit more diverse, usually allocating build points based off of the genrea involved. A game where the party is meant to hide and survive in a wasteland ruled by powerful mutants will have far fewer points than a superhero game for example. The theoretical idea here is that this game might show more skill, but it can also be problematic. SOmeone with a greater level of system mastery can wipe out less skilled people, and synergy is more important. Neutrally weighted games also tend to be somewhat unfocused, the game doesn't necessarily 'care' what each side does, the goal is more to create a game that is generally workable and the focus of balance is more towards ensuring that nothing shattering comes in rather than defending one side of the screen or the other.

The games weighted in favor of the system are a bit more complex, most of them are games like Chaosims Call of Cthulhu or certain whitewolf games. In this regard the game is either actively set against the players or it is designed to make the game essentially an ordeal for them. The game is set heavily against the players, odds are that their opponents least soldiers are 50 times stronger than they could ever be, they need all their cunning, caution and luck just to get away let alone have any hope of harming the thing. In these games you don't slay great monsters and horrors, instead you usually fight tooth and nail, more than half the group dying, to stop a cultist from summoning a great horror. Your greatest victories are phyrric, and your successes only fleeting. But there is another type, in this game you might be reasonably powerful, perhaps even above average. The problem instead is that you face a goal, a challenge, that does not yield to power, to most wit, instead you play the role of a tragic hero, perhaps to find redemption but more likely to become a figure who is cheered on despite knowing they will not succeed. White Wolf has several games like this, one of them being Promethean. The game itself is hard to describe but the tale of sisyphus is probably the closest example, however in this regard someone is constantly throwing stones at him as well as trying to pour grease on the hill.

These game types can allow for a lot of different interesting stories, for those starting in a genre these games can help explain and set a tone and scene. For those more experienced they can even make a horror game using a game weighted towards the players or a heroic game with a system weighted against them.

First post

This blog is meant to serve as sort of a general discussion on RPGs, mostly tabletop games but occasionally video games and MMOs. My topics are likely not going to have a central focus to them in terms of what I cover, my big things are going to be discussing design theory, balance, different styles of gaming and how different types of games are. If anyone has something they'd want mentioned say so in the comments section and I will see what I can do. Hope this goes well, thanks.